Today's Kindle Deal of the Day is
The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (
$1.99), by Cynthia C. Kelly and Richard Rhodes.
Book Description
The first collection ever of the writings and insights of the original creators of the atomic bomb, along with pieces by the most important historians and interpreters of the subject, is now in paperback.
Born out of a small research program begun in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people, including our foremost scientists and thinkers, and cost nearly $2 billion—and it was operated under a shroud of absolute secrecy. This groundbreaking collection of documents, essays, articles, and excerpts from histories, biographies, plays, novels, letters, and the oral histories of key eyewitnesses is the freshest, most exhaustive exploration yet of the topic.
Compiled by experts at the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the book features first-hand material by Albert Einstein, Leslie Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Henry Stimson, and many others.
Dozens of photographs depict key moments and significant figures, and concise explanatory material accompanies each selection. The project's aftermath and legacy are covered as well, making this the most comprehensive account of the birth of the atomic age.
Granta 119: Britain (
$2.02 / £1.29 UK), an issue of
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing edited by John Freeman, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the
US edition is $10.36).
Book Description
In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with new political alliances and negotiating shifting demographics. Yet it is still perceived as being bound by tradition and class structures. With new fiction, memoir, poetry, photography and art, Granta's Britain explores landscape, identities and stories of the British Isles. In 'Silt', Robert Macfarlane writes of the beauty, danger and mystery of a stretch of coastline in Essex. Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of Irish nationalist Roger Casement, executed at Pentonville Prison in 1916. Memoirs by Gary Younge, Andrea Stuart and Nikolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada focus on the upheavals and migrations that brought them and their families to (and from) Britain. Rachel Seiffert, Ross Raisin, Cynan Jones and Jim Crace provide extracts of new novels: Seiffert describes Glasgow and Northern Ireland in the 1990s; Raisin paints a portrait of a young footballer struggling with his identity; Jones follows a boy on a brutal and transformative outing with his father and their dogs; Crace shows how the lives of English farmers changed drastically during the early Enclosures. The issue includes original short fiction by Adam Foulds, Mark Haddon, Tania James and Jon McGregor as well as poems by Simon Armitage, Jamie McKendrick, Don Paterson and Robin Robertson. It also introduces a new voice, Sam Byers, with an extract from his darkly comic debut novel, Idiopathy.
Heart of the Matter (
$2.99 Kindle,
B&N,
Kobo
), by Emily Giffin, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle and Kobo.
Book Description
Tessa Russo is the mother of two young children and the wife of a renowned pediatric surgeon. Despite her own mother's warnings, Tessa has recently given up her career to focus on her family and the pursuit of domestic happiness. From the outside, she seems destined to live a charmed life.
Valerie Anderson is an attorney and single mother to six-year-old Charlie--a boy who has never known his father. After too many disappointments, she has given up on romance--and even to some degree, friendships--believing that it is always safer not to expect too much.
Although both women live in the same Boston suburb, the two have relatively little in common aside from a fierce love for their children. But one night, a tragic accident causes their lives to converge in ways no one could have imagined.
In alternating, pitch-perfect points of view, Emily Giffin creates a moving, luminous story of good people caught in untenable circumstances. Each being tested in ways they never thought possible. Each questioning everything they once believed. And each ultimately discovering what truly matters most.
Gregor the Overlander ($5.24 Kindle,
$1.00 B&N), the first title in the Underland Chronicles series by Suzanne Collins (author of
The Hunger Games), is the Nook Daily Find for Families. At that price, it's a must-buy for those who didn't pick up
Gregor the Overlander Collection (Books 1-5) when it was on sale. I've reported the price difference to Amazon and suspect there will be a price drop by evening, if enough others do. This series is aimed at middle graders (so is perfect for kids that aren't quite ready for
The Hunger Games series), but you'll see a lot of reviews by adults that read it and loved it. It is different from the later series, though, and much more character driven, rather than action in every scene.
Book Description
This irresistible first novel tells the story of a quiet boy who embarks on a dangerous quest in order to fulfill his destiny -- and find his father -- in a strange world beneath New York City.
When Gregor falls through a grate in the laundry room of his apartment building, he hurtles into the dark Underland, where spiders, rats, cockroaches coexist uneasily with humans. This world is on the brink of war, and Gregor's arrival is no accident. A prophecy foretells that Gregor has a role to play in the Underland's uncertain future. Gregor wants no part of it -- until he realizes it's the only way to solve the mystery of his father's disappearance. Reluctantly, Gregor embarks on a dangerous adventure that will change both him and the Underland forever.
Gr 4-8
