FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[sufue]

It's hard to believe that The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop, was first published in 2008, because it felt very timely when I read it just a few years ago, and still very timely today. It's on sale right now at Kindle US for $1.99; not at Kobo US, at least as of now.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Sort-Clus...dp/B0077FAYES/
Kindle US/Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/Big-Sort-Cl...dp/B0077FAYES/

Spoiler:

The award-winning journalist reveals the untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided in this groundbreaking book.

Armed with startling demographic data, Bill Bishop demonstrates how Americans have spent decades sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not by region or by state, but by city and neighborhood. With ever-increasing specificity, we choose the communities and media that are compatible with our lifestyles and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away.

In The Big Sort, Bishop explores how this phenomenon came to be, and its dire implications for our country. He begins with stories about how we live today and then draws on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.

[bookmarked]

Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven H. Strogatz is on sale for $2.99.

At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat, the sound of cycles in sync. Along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, thousands of fireflies congregate and flash in unison; the moon spins in perfect resonance with its orbit around the earth; our hearts depend on the synchronous firing of ten thousand pacemaker cells. While the forces that synchronize the flashing of fireflies may seem to have nothing to do with our heart cells, there is in fact a deep connection.

Synchrony is a science in its infancy, and Strogatz is a pioneer in this new frontier in which mathematicians and physicists attempt to pinpoint just how spontaneous order emerges from chaos. From underground caves in Texas where a French scientist spent six months alone tracking his sleep-wake cycle, to the home of a Dutch physicist who in 1665 discovered two of his pendulum clocks swinging in perfect time, this fascinating book spans disciplines, continents, and centuries. Engagingly written for readers of books such as Chaos and The Elegant Universe, Sync is a tour-de-force of nonfiction writing.

From Publishers Weekly
Strogatz is a Cornell mathematician and pioneer of the science of synchrony, which brings mathematics, physics and biology to bear on the mystery of how spontaneous order occurs at every level of the cosmos, from the nucleus on up. In this eminently accessible and entertaining book, Strogatz explores the mysterious synchrony achieved by fireflies that flash in unison by the thousands, and the question of what makes our own body clocks synchronize with night and day and even with one another. He explores the sync of inanimate objects, inadvertently discovered by Christiaan Huygens in 1665 when he observed that his two pendulum clocks would swing in unison when they were within a certain distance of each other. A case of spontaneous synchrony occurred on the 2000 opening of the Millennium footbridge in London when hundreds of pedestrians caused the bridge to undulate erratically as they unconsciously adjusted their pace to the bridge's swaying-it was closed two days later. Strogatz explores synchrony in chaos systems, at the quantum level, in small-world networks as exemplified by the parlor game "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" and in human behavior involving fads, mobs and the herd mentality of stock traders. The author traces how the isolated and often accidental discoveries of researchers are beginning to gel into the science of synchrony, and he amply illustrates how the laws of mathematics underlie the universe's uncanny capacity for spontaneous order.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

[itisbomb]

The Irrational Bundle (Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty)
by Dr. Dan Ariely

is $3.99 at Kobo U.S.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-irrational-bundle

[sufue]

His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham, is part of today's US Kindle Daily Deal, at $3.99, matched at Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088QLGQTJ/
Kindle US/Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B088QLGQTJ/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/his...-marching-on-2

Spoiler:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND COSMOPOLITAN

John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope.

Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.

[Section8]

The Woman Who Smashed Codes is $2.99 at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M0EOI6I

Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.

[Section8]

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson is on sale at Amazon.com for $3.99: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JGAS65Q

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a “riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving” (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the internet.

[sufue]

Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912, by Donald Keene, is $1.99 as part of today's US Kindle Daily Deal. For some reason, this caught my eye and looked interesting enough to become part of my non-fiction TBR pile - probably because it's about a time/place I know very little (nothing, if I'm honest ) about.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Japan...dp/B007C52EJQ/
Kindle US/Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/Emperor-Jap...dp/B007C52EJQ/

Spoiler:

The renowned Japanese scholar “brings us as close to the inner life of the Meiji emperor as we are ever likely to get” (The New York Times Book Review).

When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state.

Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan’s history.

In this vivid and engrossing biography, we move with the emperor through his early, traditional education; join in the formal processions that acquainted the young emperor with his country and its people; observe his behavior in court, his marriage, and his relationships with various consorts; and follow his maturation into a “Confucian” sovereign dedicated to simplicity, frugality, and hard work. Later, during Japan’s wars with China and Russia, we witness Meiji’s struggle to reconcile his personal commitment to peace and his nation’s increasingly militarized experience of modernization. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest.

“Utterly brilliant . . . the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan.”—Los Angeles Times