Repeat freebies from Christian publishers:
A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars (
$1.99), by Nicholas Rankin, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day. This is one of those well-researched non-fiction titles from Oxford University Press, which I'd recommend to history/war/military buffs, homeschoolers and those looking for strategies for the coming zombie apocalypse (after all, zombies should be even easier to fool!).
Book Description
In February 1942, intelligence officer Victor Jones erected 150 tents behind British lines in North Africa. "Hiding tanks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick," writes Nicholas Rankin; German general Erwin Rommel not only knew of the ploy, but had copied it himself. Jones knew that Rommel knew. In fact, he counted on it--for these tents were empty. With the deception that he was carrying out a deception, Jones made a weak point look like a trap.
In A Genius for Deception, Rankin offers a lively and comprehensive history of how Britain bluffed, tricked, and spied its way to victory in two world wars. As he shows, a coherent program of strategic deception emerged in World War I, resting on the pillars of camouflage, propaganda, secret intelligence, and special forces. All forms of deception found an avid sponsor in Winston Churchill, who carried his enthusiasm for deceiving the enemy into World War II. Rankin vividly recounts such little-known episodes as the invention of camouflage by two French artist-soldiers, the creation of dummy airfields for the Germans to bomb during the Blitz, and the fabrication of an army that would supposedly invade Greece. Strategic deception would be key to a number of WWII battles, culminating in the massive misdirection that proved critical to the success of the D-Day invasion in 1944.
Deeply researched and written with an eye for telling detail, A Genius for Deception shows how British used craft and cunning to help win the most devastating wars in human history.
Murder at Mansfield Park (
$1.55 / £0.99 UK), by Lynn Shepherd, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the
US edition is $9.99).
Book Description
Ever wondered what it would have been like if Jane Austen had turned her hand to murder?
Murder at Mansfield Park takes Austen's masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie.
Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain of events that leads inexorably to violence and death.
Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions raised by Jane Austen's text. Austen's Mansfield Park is radically different from any of her other works, and much of the pleasure of Lynn Shepherd's novel lies in the way it takes the characters and episodes in the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful book, with a new heroine at its centre - a heroine who owes far more to the lively and spirited Elizabeth Bennet, than the dreary and insipid Fanny Price.
1,001 Facts that Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader (
$3.99 Kindle,
B&N), by Cary McNeal, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.
Book Description
Fact: Chocolate contains the alkaloid theobromine, which in high doses can be toxic to humans, and in even small amounts can kill dogs, parrots, horses, and cats.
This means that despite its name, the Kit-Kat candy bar is not a recommended snack for your kitty-cat. I wonder how many cats have died because of this confusion.
Fact: The most germ-laden place on your toilet isn't the seat or even the bowl:
It's the handle.
The solution: Don't flush. Let the next guy worry about it.
There are "just the facts"--and then there are just the facts that will frighten the bejeezus out of you. And thanks to this little gem of a bathroom book, you'll never look at the world the same way again, without, er, dry heaving a little bit.
From the sneaky fish that can swim up our genitals to the e coli bacteria lurking in the very water we drink, disturbing phenomena are everywhere we turn. Educational, entertaining, and undeniably horrifying, this book isn't guaranteed to help you, um, go to the bathroom, but it's certain to make your time there more . . . informed.
Miss Daisy Is Crazy! (My Weird School Series #1) ($3.99 Kindle,
$1.99 B&N), by Dan Gutman and Jim Paillot (Illustrator), is the Nook Daily Find for Families; this one is an Agency book and should be price matched on Kindle, but so far it hasn't dropped (I always report these, so Amazon can get the publisher to fix the pricing).
Book Description
Never before has school been this mixed up—or this much fun!
Miss Daisy, who teaches second grade, doesn't know how to add or subtract. Not only that, she doesn't know how to read or write, either. She is the dumbest teacher in the history of the world!
