Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for July, 2014.
The nominations will run through midnight EST June 30 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.
Book selection category for July is:
Non-Fiction
In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).
How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.
How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.
How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.
How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.
How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.
When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.
The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.
Amazon.com Review Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish:
(Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks's unusual and fascinating case histories of "differently brained" people and phenomena—a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a community of people born totally colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few--have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the patient as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007's Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.)
Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book—an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.
The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish—and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.
Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank.
A rare and remarkable cultural history of World War I that unearths the roots of modernism
Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I, from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. Recognizing that “The Great War was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole,” author Modris Eksteins examines the lives of ordinary people, works of modern literature, and pivotal historical events to redefine the way we look at our past and toward our future.
The alimentary canal—the much-maligned tube from mouth to rear—is as taboo, in its way, as the cadavers in Stiff, and as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. In Gulp we meet the scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks—or has the courage—to ask. How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? Can wine tasters really tell a $10 bottle from a $100 bottle? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? We go on location to a pet food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal.
Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.
Like all of Roach's books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.
When baseball great Ty Cobb died in 1961, Ritter got the idea to interview the few remaining contemporaries of Cobb before they too all died. The result was a highly respected best seller, an oral history.
"Almost perfect . . . a vivid, gentle, and humorous narrative, accompanied by marvelous photographs." - The New Yorker
"Easily the best baseball book ever produced by anyone." -- -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"I could happily reread every summer for the rest of my life that greatest of all baseball books..." -- -- Stephen Jay Gould, The New York Times Book Review
"Quite simply the best sports book in recent memory." -- -- Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
"The single best baseball book of all time." -- -- Red Barber
"There's not a dull moment in the whole book." -- The Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer
"The Glory of Their Times will be around as long as baseball." -- -- Nelson Algren
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields.
Some of the more intriguing sounding titles in this collection of essays include "On Tenderness", "Beyond the Quantum Horizon", "Is Space Digital?", "The Sweet Spot in Time", "Machines of the Infinite", "Altered States", "Super Humanity", "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?", "The Wisdom of Psychopaths", and much more.
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
In this groundbreaking work that sets apart fact and legend, authors Finkelstein and Silberman use significant archeological discoveries to provide historical information about biblical Israel and its neighbors.
In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible -- the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua's conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon's vast empire; -- reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts.
Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.
Self-published books' share of the UK market grew by 79% in 2013, with 18m self-published books bought by UK readers last year, according to new statistics.
With print sales falling by 10% last year, and book purchasing as a whole down 4%, ebook sales continue to grow, according to Nielsen's comprehensive tracking of book purchases, up 20% in the UK in 2013, with 80m ebooks bought by UK consumers, to a value of £300m. But it is the DIY market which is showing the most eye-watering growth, up 79% to 18m self-published titles purchased, worth £59m, according to the statistics released on Friday.
More at the source.
With a caveat on the methodology: the numbers quoted are almost certainly low because a whole lot of indiepubs don't bother to get ISBN numbers. (They're not needed to get on Amazon or other vendors or distributors.)
And a fair amount of small or even medium "publishing houses" are actually indies working as LLCs.
Whispersync for Voice lets you start reading while you’re at home, switch to listening on your commute—now with just one tap
Audio upgrades to Kindle books are available from Audible for as little as $0.99, with upgrades to bestsellers available for as little as $3.99
Amazon today announced that Kindle for Android and Kindle for iOS are getting even better, with a free software update that builds a seamless listening experience right into the app. With Whispersync for Voice, recently called “Amazon’s killer new app for books” by the Wall Street Journal, the Kindle app now lets you switch instantly between reading a Kindle book and listening to the companion audiobook from Audible—all with just one tap, without leaving the book.
The companies announced on Thursday that they will launch co-branded tablets. The devices will be known as Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, and feature Samsung's hardware and customized Nook software from Barnes & Noble. The first Galaxy Tab 4 Nook will hit US store shelves in August with a 7-inch display.
The decision to partner with Samsung might be a good one for Barnes & Noble. The company's Nook business has been falling off a cliff, with its last-reported quarter ended January 25 showing a 50.4 percent decline in sales and shareholders have been calling on the company to make drastic changes or shutter the operation altogether. Samsung, meanwhile, is performing somewhat well in the tablet space and is one of the leaders in Android-based tablets.
The partnership effectively ends Barnes & Noble's foray into hardware design. The company said on Thursday that while it'll still offer its Nook GlowLight -- a backlit e-ink e-reader -- it will now only support the Nook slates it's launched to this point. Leaving the hardware design to Samsung allows Barnes & Noble to focus on its own software and Nook content sales.
Nook content sales have also proven difficult to generate. During the last-reported quarter, Nook content sales, which includes digital apps and e-books, among other services, saw sales drop 26.5 percent year-over-year to $57 million.
More at the source.
So Samsung pushes Kindle and sells a Nook?
Smells like an experiment.
Don't know much about it, but the Amazon site has a banner at the top of the page mentioning a new device launch event on June 18th in Seattle. Says you can request an invitation here... https://www.amazon.com/oc/launcheven...pf_rd_i=507846
July 2014 Book Club Nominations
Nice snappy name:
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