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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Weekend Kindle Book Sale?

At the end of last month, Amazon marked down a number of Kindle books, at prices under $2, to match or even beat the discounted hardback and paperback prices. Those books went back up to "normal" prices (most over $14) this week. Late yesterday, many of those same books were marked back down, along with a number of newly discounted titles. Here are some of the more interesting looking ones (that I haven't had in an earlier post).

The Interruption of Everything ($0.77), by Terry McMillan, author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Waiting to Exhale and A Day Late and a Dollar Short.

Book Description
Marilyn Grimes, wife and mother of three, has made a career of deferring her dreams to build a suburban California home and lifestyle with her workaholic husband, Leon. She also troubleshoots for her grown kids, cares for her live-in mother-in-law (and elderly poodle, Snuffy), keeps tabs on her girlfriends Paulette and Bunny and her own aging mother and foster sister--and holds down a part-time job. But at forty-four, Marilyn's got too much on her plate and nothing to feed her passion. She feels like she's about ready to jump. She's just not sure where.

Highly entertaining, deeply human, a page-turner full of heart and soul, this time McMillan turns her eye to the question of how one woman can start putting her own needs higher on the to-do list while not shortchanging those she loves. The Interruption of Everything is a triumphant testament to the fact that the detour is the path, and living life "by the numbers" never quite adds up.


Triple Homicide ($0.89), by Charles Hynes

Book Description
The debut novel from longtime Brooklyn district attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes, Triple Homicide is the gritty saga of two generations of New York City police officers fighting to stay on the right side of the law. In the early 1990s in New York, easy money stands to be made at every turn, and temptation proves a bitter struggle for the young and much-decorated NYPD Sergeant Steven Holt---and for Steven and his uncle Robert, an officer before him, an increasingly violent mess endangers their careers and the reputation of the entire department.

Born out of real stories of corruption and centered around two men who ultimately dare to challenge the fabled “blue wall” of silence, the novel works toward a majestic courtroom on Long Island, where Sergeant Holt is about to stand trial for triple homicide and where, as he comes to know his past, he’ll learn that nothing he’s known has ever been as it seemed.

In its intense telling by one of the only writers who could write it with such realism, the story uncovers decades of deceit and corruption that infiltrate families and threaten to ruin the force. Reflecting the proud yet troubled history of the NYPD, Charles Hynes’s debut is a searing, up-close portrait of the men and women who live---and die---in the pursuit of criminal justice.


At the City's Edge ($0.87), by Marcus Sakey

Book Description
Jason Palmer loved being a soldier. But after returning home from Iraq with an "other than honorable" discharge, he's finding rebuilding his life the toughest battle yet.

Elena Cruz is a talented cop, the first woman to make Chicago's prestigious Gang Intelligence Unit. She's ready for anything the job can throw at her.... Until Jason's brother, a prominent community activist, is murdered in front of his own son.

Now, stalked by brutal men with a shadowy agenda, Jason and Elena must unravel a conspiracy stretching from the darkest alleys of the ghetto to the manicured lawns of the city's power brokers. In a world where corruption and violence are simply the cost of doing business, two damaged people are all that stand between an innocent child--and the killers who will stop at nothing to find him.


Homeland ($2.99), by R.A. Salvatore, book one in the The Legend of Drizzt series.

Book Description
Drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, first introduced in The Icewind Dale Trilogy, quickly became one of the fantasy genre’s standout characters. But Homeland first reveals the startling tale of how this one lone drow walked out of the shadowy depths of the Underdark, leaving behind a society of evil and a family who want him dead. It is here that the story of this amazing dark elf truly began.

Star Shadows ($0.73), by Colby Hodge

Book Description
He was the only man she'd ever loved. The one who'd roused her innocent girlhood passions...the one she held responsible for her brother's death. So when Boone's starship was shot down over a faraway planet, Elle resolved to forget him, to devote herself to her duty as the future ruler of Oasis. She focused her formidable mind on honing her powers until the day she witnessed a pair of sweat-sleek, breathtaking gladiators facing each other down in the vicious fight-to-the-death of the Murlacca. Here were the two men she'd thought lost to her forever, and one last chance to save them. It was up to Elle to outwit the Circe witches who held Boone and Zander prisoner, so she could claim a love that had once seemed as elusive as... Star Shadows.

Pressing the Bet ($2.41), by W. L. Ripley

Book Description
Cole Springer returns in this raucous follow-up to Springer's Gambit. Ex-secret service agent Cole Springer has money and time on his hands. He doesn't mind the money part but the extra time has him restless and bored. That's about to change. L.A. grifter Spider John Dupree has a plan to relieve Springer of the extra cash. With the help of a Denver mob soldier, a hood with a violent streak as big as the Rockies, Dupree tries to shake down Springer by threatening to go to Mob bosses and reveal how Springer amassed his fortune. Blackmail. Pay or die. But Springer isn't an easy mark. And he's hard to scare. Or kill.

The Faraway War ($2.18), by Enrique Clio

Book Description
Henry Reeve was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1850. At fifteen, too young to join the military, he enlisted in the Union Army as a drummer boy. Three years later, he went on an expedition to Cuba to join the Cuban insurgents fighting the Spanish Army. In his first battle, Reeve and other rebels were captured and executed by firing squad. Miraculously, the Brooklynite survived his wounds, was rescued by Cuban rebels, and joined their fight. By the time he was killed in battle, he was a brigadier general in the Liberation Army. Today almost no one in the United States knows who Henry Reeve was, but just about every Cuban knows his story and admires him.

Amusingly, Reeve is known in Cuba as “the Young Englishman,” because he spoke the English language. But Henry Reeve was an American, and a Brooklyn boy all the way.

The Communist dictatorship in Cuba has gone to great lengths to conceal from its people the role that many Americans played in the liberation of Cuba from Spanish colonialism. The story of this one brave man, the most respected American hero in Cuban history, is an engaging, enthralling read.


Ambush ($1.72), by Paul Carson

Book Description
American expat Scott Nolan has recently moved to Ireland and enjoys a flourishing career as a doctor, a rising media profile as a persuasive campaigner against drug abuse, and is very much in love with Laura, his beautiful new wife. But one wintry Dublin morning, Scott’s life is changed forever when a team of contract killers attempts a daring double ambush. Their target: Ireland’s antidrug government minister and his medical spokesman, Dr. Scott Nolan. The attack goes horribly wrong, and in the bloodbath that follows, Laura is killed by a bullet meant for Nolan. Fueled by grief and revenge, and desperate to claim back his life and find the killers, Scott enters into an uneasy alliance with his wife’s brother, police detective Mark Higgins. Together they embark on a highly controversial international covert mission to slowly and systematically infiltrate the drug scene and track down the assassin. Using secret U.S. army interrogation compounds and breaking almost every law in the land, the duo finally close in on their target . . . . This nail biting, heart-pounding blockbuster weaves a tale from the back streets of Dublin to the red-light districts of Amsterdam and the seedy streets of Bangkok, accelerating to a breathtaking climax that will test Nolan’s physical and moral fortitude to the absolute limit.

FOR LIBERTY AND GLORY ($1.12), by James R. Gaines

Book Description
This book tells the story of the French and American Revolutions in a single, thrilling narrative that shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were. Their leaders were often seen as father and son, but the relationship of George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette, while close, was every bit as complex as the long, fraught history of the French-American alliance, of which they were also the founding fathers.

Counterknowledge ($1.81), by Damian Thompson

Book Description
An important and compelling book on the viral dissemination of misinformation in today's world. We are being swamped with dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to alternative medicine, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world. For Damian Thompson, the misinformation industry is wreaking havoc on the once-lauded virtues of science and reason. Unproven theories and spurious claims are forms of "counterknowledge," and, helped by the Internet, they are creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. Thompson explores our readiness to accept falsehoods and the viral role of technology in spreading quack remedies, pseudo-history, and creationist fanaticism. Following in the footsteps of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, Counterknowledge is a brilliant defense of scientific proof in an age of fabrication. .

Bitter Sweets ($1.13), by Roopa Farooki

Book Description
With this spellbinding first novel about the destructive lies three immigrant generations of a Pakistani/Bangladeshi family tell each other, Roopa Farooki adds a fresh new voice to the company of Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arudhati Roy.

Henna Rub is a precocious teenager whose wheeler-dealer father never misses a business opportunity and whose sumptuous Calcutta marriage to wealthy romantic Ricky-Rashid Karim is achieved by an audacious network of lies. Ricky will learn the truth about his seductive bride, but the way is already paved for a future of double lives and deception--family traits that will filter naturally through the generations, forming an instinctive and unspoken tradition. Even as a child, their daughter Shona, herself conceived on a lie and born in a liar's house, finds telling fibs as easy as ABC. But years later, living above a sweatshop in South London's Tooting Bec, it is Shona who is forced to discover unspeakable truths about her loved ones and come to terms with what superficially holds her family together--and also keeps them apart--across geographical, emotional and cultural distance.

Roopa Farooki has crafted an intelligent, engrossing and emotionally powerful Indian family saga that will stay with you long after you've read the last page.


The Brontes (Authors in Context) ($1.15), by Patricia Ingham

Book Description
The extraordinary creativity of the Bronte sisters, who between them wrote some of the most enduring fiction in the English language, continues to fascinate and intrigue modern readers. The tragedy of their early deaths adds poignancy to their novels, and in the popular imagination they have become mythic figures. And yet, as Patricia Ingham shows, they were fully engaged with the world around them, and their writing, from the juvenilia to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, reflects the preoccupations of the age in which they lived. Their novels, which so shocked their contemporaries, address the burning issues of the day: class, gender, race, religion, and mental disorders. As well as examining these connections, Ingham also shows how film and other media have reinterpreted the novels for the twenty-first century.

The Brontes is a lively, accessible, and critically topical exploration of the novels of the three sisters, and includes a chronology of the Brontes, websites, illustrations, a comprehensive index, and suggestions for further reading.


Ambivalence ($1.25), by Jonathan Garfinkel

Book Description
With lofty ideals, spectacular ambivalence, and endearing naivet?, Jonathan Garfinkel explores Israel and Palestine by talking to ordinary people.Jonathan Garfinkel can?t make up his mind?not about his girlfriend, or Judaism, or Israel. After hearing about a house in Jerusalem where Jews and Arabs coexist in peace, he decides it?s time to venture there. In Israel, nothing is as he imagined it, and nothing is as he was taught. Garfinkel gives us the people behind the headlines: from secret assignations with Palestinian activists and an uninvited visit at an Arab refugee camp to Passover with Orthodox Jewish friends and finding the truth about the mythic coexistence house, Ambivalence is the provocative, surreal, and often hilarious chronicle of his travels. In this part memoir and part quest, Garfinkel struggles with the growing divisions in a troubled region and with the divide in his soul.?Marvelous. Garfinkel deftly mines what it means to simultaneously belong, disavow, love, and loathe an identity, a culture, and a history...

Signs of Life: Back to the Basics of Authentic Christianity ($1.71), by David Jeremiah

Book Description
Discover personal transformation that changes the world.

Just as there are physical signs that determine the overall health and wellness of a patient, so too there are signs of life determining the extent to which a man or woman has been transformed into the image of Jesus. It's a smile, a simple lifestyle, compassion in the face of misfortune, willingness to commit random acts of kindness, benevolence, social justice, tears, words.

In Signs of Life bestselling author David Jeremiah leads readers through a forty-day journey to a fuller understanding of what these signs are and how to be a person marked by them. This journey pursues a life characterized by relevancy, surrender, authenticity, generosity, and compassion-and in so doing, transforms individuals, communities, and nations.

Whether new to the Christian faith or considered an old-timer, readers will discover what being transformed personally into the image of Jesus means and be equipped with a greater vision for the life they are freed to live.

Why Jesus Died ($0.73), by Gerard S. Sloyan

Book Description
Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross at the hands of Roman justice around the year 30 C.E. Thousands of others perished in the same way, and many people before and since have suffered far more gruesome torments. Why then is Jesus, asks Gerard Sloyan, uniquely and universally remembered for his suffering death? In this timely, expert, and fully engaging account, this widely acclaimed biblical scholar and historian adroitly discusses:
  • how Jesus died
  • who was responsible for his death
  • how his death came to be seen as redemptive
  • how accounts of his death figured in the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment
For all who wondered about what really happened in the passion and death of Jesus and how his legacy grew, Sloyan's book will provide reliable and enlightening reading. With thoughtful study questions and a list of further reading, this short book is perfect for individual or group use.

Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound ($3.77), by Alyn Shipton

Book Description
Jazz Makers gathers together short biographies of more than 50 of jazz's greatest stars, from its early beginnings to the present. The stories of these innovative instrumentalists, bandleaders, and composers reveal the fascinating history of jazz in six parts:
* The Pioneers, including Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith
* Swing Bands and Soloists, with Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday
* The Piano Giants, featuring Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and Mary Lou Williams
* Birth of Bebop, including Dizzy Gillepsie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis
* Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, and Fusion, with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Stan Getz
* A Century of Jazz, featuring Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, and other contemporary greats.


Johnny Cash: Life Of An American Icon ($0.97), by Stephen Miller

Book Description
Biography of the 'Man In Black', and one of the greatest country voices of all time.