Free and bargain Non-Fiction in September 2013

[koland]

As requested, here is an outline of the purpose of this thread:

We point out free and bargain Non-Fiction to each other, and occasionally recommend certain books that are/were free (or the opposite!).

Because Kindle freebies are easiest to find, the majority of the books listed are from Amazon, but freebies and bargains from other retailers and in other formats are more than welcome!

In case no retailer is specifically mentioned in a post, it is safe to assume it's for Amazon US.

Be aware that many freebies are only free for a day, so grab them fast. Enjoy!

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If you happen to check this thread before 3AM (eastern US), you can find last week's freebies from FT Press here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=n:154606...d-publisher=FT Press

For those checking later in the morning, this week's selections should be up (usually after 4AM or so).

[Difflugia]

Two of Richard Elliott Friedman's books from HarperCollins are $3.99 right now.

The Hidden Book in the Bible (regular $8.99) B&N Kobo Ebooks.com Amazon

Renowned biblical sleuth and scholar Richard Elliot Friedman reveals the first work of prose literature in the world-a 3000-year-old epic hidden within the books of the Hebrew Bible. Written by a single, masterful author but obscured by ancient editors and lost for millennia, this brilliant epic of love, deception, war, and redemption is a compelling account of humankind's complex relationship with God. Friedman boldly restores this prose masterpiece-the very heart of the Bible-to the extraordinary form in which it was originally written.

Commentary on the Torah (regular $21.99) B&N Kobo Ebooks.com Sony Amazon

In this groundbreaking and insightful new commentary, one of the world's leading biblical scholars unveils the unity and continuity of the Torah for the modern reader. Richard Elliott Friedman, the bestselling author of Who Wrote the Bible?, integrates the most recent discoveries in biblical archaeology and research with the fruits of years of experience studying and teaching the Bible to illuminate the straightforward meaning of the text -- "to shed new light on the Torah and, more important, to open windows through which it sheds its light on us."

While other commentaries are generally collections of comments by a number of scholars, this is a unified commentary on the Torah by a single scholar, the most unified by a Jewish scholar in centuries. It includes the original Hebrew text, a new translation, and an authoritative, accessibly written interpretation and analysis of each passage that remains focused on the meaning of the Torah as a whole, showing how its separate books are united into one cohesive, all-encompassing sacred literary masterpiece. This landmark work is destined to take its place as a classic in the libraries of lay readers and scholars alike, as we seek to understand the significance of the scriptural texts for our lives today, and for years to come.

[pisceschick]

The August Univeristy of Chicago Press book is still up, if you haven't picked it up yet:

Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories
by Carlo Rotella

From jazz fantasy camp to running a movie studio; from a fight between an old guy and a fat guy to a fear of clowns—Carlo Rotella’s Playing in Time delivers good stories full of vivid characters, all told with the unique voice and humor that have garnered Rotella many devoted readers in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, and Washington Post Magazine, among others. The two dozen essays in Playing in Time, some of which have never before been published, revolve around the themes and obsessions that have characterized Rotella’s writing from the start: boxing, music, writers, and cities. What holds them together is Rotella’s unique focus on people, craft, and what floats outside the mainstream. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on them by life, and in his writing Rotella transforms the craft and beauty he so admires in others into an art of his own.

Rotella is best known for his writings on boxing, and his essays here do not disappoint. It’s a topic that he turns to for its colorful characters, compelling settings, and formidable life lessons both in and out of the ring. He gives us tales of an older boxer who keeps unretiring and a welterweight who is “about as rich and famous as a 147-pound fighter can get these days,” and a hilarious rumination on why Muhammad Ali’s phrase “I am the greatest” began appearing (in the mouth of Epeus) in translations of The Iliad around 1987. His essays on blues, crime and science fiction writers, and urban spaces are equally and deftly engaging, combining an artist’s eye for detail with a scholar’s sense of research, whether taking us to visit detective writer George Pelecanos or to dance with the proprietress of the Baby Doll Polka Club next to Midway Airport in Chicago.

Rotella’s essays are always smart, frequently funny, and consistently surprising. This collection will be welcomed by his many fans and will bring his inimitable style and approach to an even wider audience.

[koland]

A nice one from Stackpole books tonight:

Gardening in Your Greenhouse (Greenhouse Basics) by Mark Freeman
http://www.amazon.com/Gardening-Your...dp/B001GIPRFI/

[gabby98]

Originally Posted by koland

A nice one from Stackpole books tonight:

Gardening in Your Greenhouse (Greenhouse Basics) by Mark Freeman
http://www.amazon.com/Gardening-Your...dp/B001GIPRFI/

nice, picked that one up...always wanted a greenhouse, but was weary of doing one of those patio ones before I knew what I was doing. Maybe this will help

[koland]

sadly, the greenhouse book is in topaz format...

Still, I'll just read it on the Fire.

[avantman42]

The University of Chicago Press free ebook for this month is:

Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling
KIERAN EGAN

The broad, general curriculum that is the basis of traditional elementary and secondary school education misses a vital fact about knowledge: that real knowledge of a subject is knowledge in depth. In Learning in Depth Kieran Egan outlines an ambitious yet practical plan to incorporate deep knowledge into basic education.

http://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html

[koland]

new one from Stackpole:

Basic Canoeing: All the Skills and Tools You Need to Get Started (How To Basics) by Jon Rounds, Taina Litwak, Skip Brown and Wayne Dickert

http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=n:154606...sher=stackpole

[itisbomb]

1492: The Year the World Began
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

is being sold for $2.99 at B&N

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1492...=9780061959097

Below is the blurb:
The world would end in 1492—so the prophets, soothsayers, and stargazers said. They were right. Their world did end. Ours began.

In this extraordinary, sweeping history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto traces key elements of the modern world back to that single, fateful year. Everything changed in 1492: the way power and wealth were distributed around the globe, the way major religions and civilizations divided the world, and the increasing interconnectedness of separate economies that we now call globalization. Events that began in 1492 transformed the whole ecological system of the planet. Our individualism and the very sense we share of inhabiting one world, as partakers in a common humanity, took shape and became visible in 1492.

In search of the origins of modernity, 1492 takes readers on a journey around the globe of the time, in the company of real-life travelers, drawing together the threads that came to bind the planet. The tour starts in Granada, where the last Islamic kingdom in Europe collapsed, then moves to Timbuktu, where a new Muslim empire triumphed. With Portuguese explorers, we visit the court of the first Christian king in the southern hemisphere. We join Jews expelled from Spain as they cross the Mediterranean to North Africa, Italy, and Istanbul. We see the flowering of the Renaissance in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and go to the corrupt Rome of Alexander Borgia. We see the frozen frontiers of the dynamic, bloody Russia of Ivan the Great and hear mystical poets sing on the shores of the Indian Ocean. We sail the Atlantic with Columbus. In the depths of an old volcanic crater in the Canary Islands, we witness the start of the first European overseas empire. We observe the Aztecs and Incas laying the foundations of a New World in the Americas.

Wars and witchcraft, plagues and persecutions, poetry and prophecy, science and magic, art and faith—all the glories and follies of the time are in this book. Everywhere, new departures marked the start of a new configuration for humankind, revealing how and why the modern world is different from the worlds of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

History seems a patternless labyrinth—but a good guide can trace our paths through it back to the moment when some of the most striking features of today's world began.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by itisbomb

1492: The Year the World Began
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

is being sold for $2.99 at B&N

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1492...=9780061959097

Also $2.99 at Amazon | Kobo | Sony | OmniLit

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Two of Richard Elliott Friedman's books from HarperCollins are $3.99 right now.

The Hidden Book in the Bible (regular $8.99) B&N Kobo Ebooks.com Amazon

Commentary on the Torah (regular $21.99) B&N Kobo Ebooks.com Sony Amazon

Originally Posted by itisbomb

1492: The Year the World Began
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

is being sold for $2.99 at B&N

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1492...=9780061959097...

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Also $2.99 at Amazon | Kobo | Sony | OmniLit

I really should unsubscribe to this thread. Two HarperCollins books at $3.99 each is a bargain, and a third HarperCollins book for $2.99 is an even better bargain, but that all adds up to $10.97 and a three book increase in my TBR list! I'm getting nickel and dimed to death here!

[AnemicOak]

Link to the $3.99 or less monthly Kindle deals in the Nonfiction category...

Link

[koland]

newly free from Stackpole books :

• HBoys of '67 by Charles Jones, Tony Zinni and Anthony C. Zinni
• Here There Are Tigers: The Secret Air War in Laos, 1968-69 (Stackpole Military History Series) by Reginald Hathorn (repeat)

http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=n:154606...sher=stackpole

[koland]

Three freebies (two are repeats):

• Basic Leathercrafting: All the Skills and Tools You Need to Get Started (How To Basic Series) by William Hollis, Elizabeth Letcavage and Alan Wycheck
• The Gluten-Free Good Health Cookbook: The Delicious Way to Strengthen Your Immune System and Neutralize Inflammation... by Annalise G. Roberts and Claudia Pillow
• Chaplain Turner's War by Moni Basu

http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=n:154606...tackpole|agate

[itisbomb]

Just for the Love of It
by Cathy O’Dowd

is today's Nook Daily Find. It can be downloaded for $2.99

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/just...=9780957524507

Below is the blurb:
At 8am on 29 May Cathy O’Dowd, a 30-year-old mountaineer from South Africa, stepped onto the summit of Everest and into history. She had become the first woman to climb the highest mountain in the world from both its south (Edmund Hillary) and north (George Mallory) sides. To achieve this, Cathy has had to face the ultimate risks of Everest.

During her first ascent from the south in 1996, she and her team were trapped in the killer storm described in Jon Krakauer’s best seller Into Thin Air. They finally reached the summit, only to have the thrill of success snatched away when a team member disappeared on the descent. In 1998 Cathy, attempting the north side of Everest, stopped only a few hundred metres from the summit to try and help a dying American climber. The woman’s first words were ‘don’t leave me’. Yet Cathy eventually had to leave her to save her own life.

Now Cathy has captured the drama of her Everest climbs, her passion for the challenge of climbing mountains and her love for wild places in this story of her four attempts on the mountain. Cathy tries to answer the question of why, if climbing Everest can be so dangerous, people still want to do it.

This is a book of challenge, of adventure, of love and life and death. This is Everest, the world’s highest mountain, climbed ‘just for the love of it’.