FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[sufue]

Another Kindle UK Daily Deal good for a few more hours...

Kate Mosse is better known for her fiction, but this looks really interesting to me. I especially like the "(Also)" in the title...

Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B252P4TJ

Spoiler:

“My hope is that this book will inspire as I have been inspired. It’s a love letter to the importance of history and about how, without knowing where we come from - truthfully and entirely - we cannot know who we are.”

Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is a celebration of unheard and under-heard women’s history. Within these pages you’ll meet nearly 1000 women whose names deserve to be better known: from the Mothers of Invention and the trailblazing women at the Bar; warrior queens and pirate commanders; the women who dedicated their lives to the natural world or to medicine; those women of courage who resisted and fought for what they believed; to the unsung heroes of stage, screen and stadium.

It is global, travelling the world and spanning all periods of time. It is also an intensely moving detective story of the author’s own family history as Kate Mosse pieces together the forgotten life of her great-grandmother, Lily Watson, a famous and highly-successful novelist in her day who has all but disappeared from the record . . .

Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is accessible, ambitious in its scope and fascinating in its detail. A beautifully illustrated dictionary of women, it is a love letter to family history and a personal memoir about the nature of women’s struggles to be heard and their achievements acknowledged. Joyous, celebratory and engaging, it is a book for everyone who has ever wondered how history is made.

[Aleron Ives]

'In Order To Live' by Yeonmi Park is $2:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SI0B5EY
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/in-order-to-live

In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom.

Park confronts her past with a startling resilience. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country. Park’s testimony is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

[salty-horse]

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Was on my wishlist.

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

[sufue]

More than six (!!!) years later, The Demon-Haunted World is $2.99 again at all the usual places. @Difflugia's links are all still good...

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Carl Sagan's classic, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is $2.99.

Kobo
B&N
eBooks.com
Amazon

[sufue]

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is $2.99 in the US right now.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013ZNNX5C
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the...y-of-malcolm-x

Spoiler:

ONE OF TIME’S TEN MOST IMPORTANT NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.

[sufue]

I've read and liked several of Ross King's books, and just plain loved Brunelleschi's Dome, but haven't read his Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power, which is now on sale in the US for $1.99, and discountable at Kobo US. Now it will get to join my TBR pile...

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W96602
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/machiavelli-60

Spoiler:

The author of The Prince—his controversial handbook on power, which is one of the most influential books ever written—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was no prince himself. Born to an established middle-class family, Machiavelli worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli's legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history's finest political thinkers.

[salty-horse]

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is $4 on Amazon.com
Was on my wishlist.

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.

The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.

The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is $4 on Amazon.com
Was on my wishlist.

The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

Does software user interface get covered? That seems to be going in the opposite direction.

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Does software user interface get covered? That seems to be going in the opposite direction.

Skimming it, no. It's focuses on physical objects, but the principles are applicable more broadly. It does mention some screen-based interfaces.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Skimming it, no. It's focuses on physical objects, but the principles are applicable more broadly. It does mention some screen-based interfaces.

Thanks. Sounds like a book well worth reading regardless, but it is really sad how opaque GUIs have become. Someone needs to get SW interface designers to pay attention to these principles.

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Thanks. Sounds like a book well worth reading regardless, but it is really sad how opaque GUIs have become. Someone needs to get SW interface designers to pay attention to these principles.

It's a book from 1988. Even with a revised edition (2013), I don't think it should pivot into a different focus.
I found a short description of the changes in the new edition: https://www.enginess.io/insights/wha...veryday-things

And from the official website:

What has changed from the earlier edition? A lot. The preface explains why the book was revised and then, chapter by chapter, what has changed. Summary: The world has changed a lot in the 25 years since the book was written. I have learned a lot. So the science is unchanged (except for the addition of “signifiers,” but the examples are completely new, as is the understanding of how these ideas get implemented. The last two chapters are completely new. For details read the preface.

[sufue]

I've mentioned a time or two that I'm a huge Francophile, so my eye was caught by Metropolitain, An Ode to the Paris Metro, which is part of today's Daily Deal in the US, and matched at Kobo US.

The author is Andrew Martin, who is better known, to me at least, as the author of a mystery series featuring Jim Stringer, a British railroad worker and amateur sleuth, but has also written several non-fiction books about trains. I just now read the sample for this book, and was amused to learn that Martin's dad worked for British Rail, which somewhat explains the railway-ish flavor of both his non-fiction and his fiction .

In any case, Martin's Metropolitain (he also explains in the intro why he left off the accent aigu on the "e") is on sale right now in the US for $2.99, and also in the UK for £2.99.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTLQVQSJ
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/metropolitain-2
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BTLQVQSJ

Spoiler:

Andrew Martin has been described as 'the laureate of railways', having written many books with railway themes. But Andrew has always been obsessed with the Paris Metro, hence Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro, the first English history of the Metro for the general reader.

Metropolitain is as stylish as the Metro itself and laced with cultural references. Andrew explains why Last Tango in Paris is a great Metro film, and what the Metro chase scene in the classic thriller, Le Samourai, says about Parisian culture. He describes how he came to appreciate the beauty of Guimard's sinuous green Metro entrances when he bought a lily of the valley and observed it flowering on his desk. We meet Andrew's half-English, half-French friend, Julian, who runs a society dedicated to Metro history. He tells Andrew, 'A Metro station is like the wine cellar of chateau, which is a very nice thing to be reminded of.'

The book takes the reader on a constant tour of Paris, both underground and over. But Paris, and the Metro, is changing, undergoing a huge expansion. This, and the imminence of the Paris Olympics, make this a timely title.

[salty-horse]

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
The story of how Linear B was deciphered.

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery.

Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean -- the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen -- to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the deipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
The story of how Linear B was deciphered.

Recommended.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963 for $1.99 at Amazon US

Spoiler:

The second volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Sylvia Plath, from the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes to the final days leading to her suicide in 1963, many never before seen.

One of the most talented and beloved poets, Sylvia Plath continues to fascinate and inspire the modern literary imagination. The tragedy of her untimely death at age thirty, almost fifty-five years ago, has left much unknown about her creative and personal life. In this remarkable second volume of the iconic poet and writer’s collected letters, the full range of Plath’s ambitions, talents, fears, and perspective is made visible through her own powerful words.

As engaging as they are revealing, these remarkable letters cover the years from 1957 to 1963. They detail the last six tumultuous and prolific years of her life, covering her marriage to Ted Hughes, the births of her children Frieda and Nicholas, her early success, including the publication of the classic The Bell Jar, and her ongoing struggle with depression.

The first compendium of its kind to include all of Plath’s letters from this period, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 offers an intimate portrait of the writing life and mind of one of the most celebrated poets in literary history.

And the first volume is now on sale: The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 1: 1940-1956 for $3.99 at Amazon US.

Spoiler:

The first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath—most never before seen.

One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world. While her renown as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets is beyond dispute, Plath was also one of its most captivating correspondents. The Letters of Sylvia Plath is the breathtaking compendium of this prolific writer’s correspondence with more than 120 people, including family, friends, contemporaries, and colleagues.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath includes her correspondence from her years at Smith, her summer editorial internship in New York City, her time at Cambridge, her experiences touring Europe, and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes in 1956.

Most of the letters are previously unseen, including sixteen letters written by Plath to Hughes when they were apart after their honeymoon. This magnificent compendium also includes twenty-seven of Plath’s own elegant line drawings taken from the letters she sent to her friends and family, as well as twenty-two previously unpublished photographs.

This remarkable, collected edition of Plath’s letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically accurate text of the known and extant letters that she wrote. Intimate and revealing, this masterful compilation offers fans and scholars generous and unprecedented insight into the life of one of our most significant poets.

My two year wait was not in vain! And, if not for randomly visiting my eReaderIQ list today, I would've missed the sale price; having paid $1.99 for the second volume, I set my notification price at $2.99, but $32.00 off the previous price is good enough for me Alas, volume 2 is currently $28.99.

All that aside, I can finally start reading these letters