The end of the month also means that the current batch of 1,000 MP3 Albums for $5 will go back to regular price and I expect the special that Amazon runs there to return to their standard 100 for next month.
Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition ($1.99), by John Howard Griffin, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day. This edition features commentary by Robert Bonazzi (Afterword) and Studs Terkel (Foreword) and photographs by Don Rutledge. I first read this when I was in middle school (by which time, segregation was in full swing and civil rights marches had given way to Vietnam protests in the papers) and have since lost my copy. It should be interesting to revisit it and see how well it holds up after a half-century of change in the South.Book Description
The setting is the deep South in 1959. What began as a scientific research project ended up fueling the racial upheavals in 1960s America. When John Howard Griffin dyed his white skin to black to find out for himself if people are discriminated against based on skin color alone, he was not prepared for what he discovered. The rest is history.
This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.
About the Author
John Howard Griffin (June 16, 1920–September 9, 1980) was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959. He wrote about this experience in his 1961 book Black Like Me.
The Secret River ($1.54 / £0.99 UK), by Australia author Kate Grenville, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $7.99).Book Description
London, 1807. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. The Thornhills arrive in this harsh and alien land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence. But among the convicts there is a rumour that freedom can be bought, that 'unclaimed' land up the Hawkesbury offers an opportunity to start afresh, far away from the township of Sydney. When William takes a hundred acres for himself he is shocked to find Aboriginal people already living on the river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them. Soon Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by Kate Summerscale, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.Book Description
In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.
At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.
Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable-that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.
