FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[andyh2000]

Originally Posted by Sumanuil

No idea. Usually they are EPUBs. But apparently not this month.

Even worse, it's not just a PDF but appears to be a PDF that consists entirely of images of pages. Thanks anyway, I can always read it on a bigger screen.

Andrew

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by issybird

This has been on my TBR for a while and I just started it this evening. When I went to add it to Goodreads, I saw that the current price is only $2.99, its lowest price ever.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQGHJM5L

So far, I find it utterly charming, appealing to both the foodie and the reader. He’s already invoked Calvin Trillin; fans (among them, me) take note.

The title doesn't show in your post, and clicking on the link did not work for me.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by issybird

This has been on my TBR for a while and I just started it this evening. When I went to add it to Goodreads, I saw that the current price is only $2.99, its lowest price ever.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQGHJM5L

So far, I find it utterly charming, appealing to both the foodie and the reader. He’s already invoked Calvin Trillin; fans (among them, me) take note.

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The title doesn't show in your post, and clicking on the link did not work for me.

I think it's this book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQGHJM5L

The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner

[salty-horse]

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments—eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment—shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness.

Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself.

[sufue]

I haven't read Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts (yet), but I have read and enjoyed his Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, which was on sale a year-and-a-half ago. Now Balkan Ghosts is on sale for $2.99 at Kindle US, and I'm going to give it a try, although I'm not sure when I'll actually get to reading it. The TBR pile is high, but fingers crossed...

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IQNYUX6

Spoiler:

A new edition of the classic travelogue exploring the Balkan Peninsula’s political, social, religious, and economic past.

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as “the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date” (Boston Globe), Kaplan’s prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

This new edition of Balkan Ghosts includes six opinion pieces written by Robert Kaplan about the Balkans between 1996 and 2000, beginning just after the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and ending after the conclusion of the Kosovo war, with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power.

[salty-horse]

American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin E. Park is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The first major history of Mormonism in a decade, drawing on newly available sources to reveal a profoundly divided faith that has nevertheless shaped the nation.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 in the so-called "burned-over district" of upstate New York, which was producing seers and prophets daily. Most of the new creeds flamed out; Smith's would endure, becoming the most significant homegrown religion in American history. How Mormonism succeeded is the story told by historian Benjamin E. Park in American Zion.

Drawing on sources that have become available only in the last two decades, Park presents a fresh, sweeping account of the Latter-day Saints: from the flight to Utah Territory in 1847 to the public renunciation of polygamy in 1890; from the Mormon leadership's forging of an alliance with the Republican Party in the wake of the New Deal to the "Mormon moment" of 2012, which saw the premiere of The Book of Mormon musical and the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney; and beyond. In the twentieth century, Park shows, Mormons began to move ever closer to the center of American life, shaping culture, politics, and law along the way.

But Park's epic isn't rooted in triumphalism. It turns out that the image of complete obedience to a single, earthly prophet -- an image spread by Mormons and non-Mormons alike -- is misleading. In fact, Mormonism has always been defined by internal conflict. Joseph Smith's wife, Emma, inaugurated a legacy of feminist agitation over gender roles. Black believers petitioned for belonging even after a racial policy was instituted in the 1850s that barred them from priesthood ordination and temple ordinances (a restriction that remained in place until 1978). Indigenous and Hispanic saints -- the latter represent a large portion of new converts today -- have likewise labored to exist within a community that long called them "Lamanites," a term that reflected White-centered theologies. Today, battles over sexuality and gender have riven the Church anew, as gay and trans saints have launched their own fight for acceptance.

A definitive, character-driven work of history, American Zion is essential to any understanding of the Mormon past, present, and future. But its lessons extend beyond the faith: as Park puts it, the Mormon story is the American story.

[salty-horse]

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Well-regarded.

The dinosaurs. 66 million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome and spectacular creatures vanished. Today their extraordinary true story remains one of our planet’s great mysteries.

In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—discovering ten new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.

Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers—themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period—into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs’ peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.”

Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research—which he calls “a new golden age of discovery”—and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.

An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs’ epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.

[Sumanuil]

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee is $2.99 on Amazon US.

Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.