The Case for Christmas

The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger ($1.59), by Lee Strobel, is a short volume (96 pages) from Zondervan Publishing; it sells for $9.99 in Hardcover.

Book Description
Who was in the manger that first Christmas morning? Some say he would become a great moral leader. Others, a social critic. Still others view Jesus as a profound philosopher, a rabbi, a feminist, a prophet, and more. Many are convinced he was the divine Son of God. Who was he-really? And how can you know for sure? Consulting experts on the Bible, archaeology, and messianic prophecy, Lee Strobel searches out the true identity of the child in the manger. Join him as he asks the tough, pointed questions you'd expect from an award-winning legal journalist. If Jesus really was God in the flesh, then there ought to be credible evidence, including Eyewitness Evidence-Can the biographies of Jesus be trusted? Scientific Evidence-What does archaeology reveal? Profile Evidence-Did Jesus fulfill the attributes of God? Fingerprint Evidence-Did Jesus uniquely match the identity of the Messiah? The Case for Christmas invites you to consider why Christmas matters in the first place. Somewhere beyond the traditions of the holiday lies the truth. It may be more compelling than you-ve realized. Weigh the facts . . . and decide for yourself.

You can also pick this up in the Sony store for $1.29.

25 Days of Free: Holiday/Christmas Music

Amazon is giving away a free Christmas/Holiday song every day from December 1 to December 25. These usually remain free even after the day they are featured, but I'll put up a link to this deal in the top banner, for those that want to check every day.

Just in case they don't feature either of these two, though, you might want to snap them up while they are free. Both were released last month:

• That'll Be Christmas by Thea Gilmore
• Silent Night by House Of Heroes

You may also want to check out today's MP3 album, Bing Crosby - Christmas Classics, currently $1.99.

Today is also the last day of the Black Friday $5 MP3 Albums Sale.

For more free music, although not necessarily holiday music, Amazon has added two pages that show only the free downloads:

• Free MP3 Albums
• Free MP3 Singles

I found this new Jazz Sampler from Pi Records there, as well as a few others that should work well when reading or entertaining.

December Suvudu Free Library

Suvudu has finally updated their Free Library page with their December picks, Wit'ch Fire, by James Clemens, and Already Dead, by Charlie Huston. Looks like they wanted to wait until more than just Sony and Amazon had them up as free before they gave us the PDF copies (which are the only DRM free copies that they give away).

Click HERE to get the PDF's or use the links above for the Kindle (for Sony, open the library software and search on the title names).

B1G1F on Kindle: Stan Jones

Through December 31st, 2009, buy the latest (Vol 4) in Stan Jone's State Trooper Nathan Active Mysteries series, Village of the Ghost Bears ($9.99), and receive a free download of the first in the series, White Sky, Black Ice (normally $9.99).

Village of the Ghost Bears
Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active must figure out what connects a dead hunter on a remote Arctic lake with a year-old fatal plane crash in the Brooks Range and a fire at the Chukchi Recreation Center that killed eight people, including the town’s basketball star. The case turns out to involve a lucrative polar bear poaching operation and the intense bond between a brother and sister from the village of Cape Goodwin, famous in the Arctic for twins, polar bears, and schizophrenia. The heart of the matter, he discovers, is a dead woman whose killer remembers her as having a mouth so sweet “it was like kissing a Hershey bar.”

White Sky, Black Ice
An Alaskan State trooper must satisfy both Eskimo and "white man's" justice.

Trooper Nathan Active, child of a fifteen-year-old unmarried Inupiat Eskimo girl, was given up for adoption and raised in Anchorage, where he graduated from the university. Now that he has been posted to his remote birth village, Chukchi, he longs to return to civilization. Before that happens, he is confronted with atypical suicides. Eskimos are notoriously at risk for self-slaughter, but never has one man after another shot himself in the Adam's apple. Can a shaman's curse really be at work?

Lucy Generous is a beautiful villager who is enlivening Nathan's tour of duty. Nathan's mother tells him to beware; she wants him to find a girl who went to college and has a good job. But with Lucy's help, the nalauqmiiyaak (almost white) state trooper begins to understand his Eskimo heritage, which provides him with the solution to the crimes that he is confronted with.

Four for the Price of One - Patricia Cornwell (EPUB)

Those whose ereaders will handle DRM'd EPUB can get Four Scarpetta Novels, by Patricia Cornwell, for $9.99 at Shortcovers, today only.

This is the same deal you can get on Kindle for $7.99 and contains the following books: The Last Precinct, Blow Fly, Predator and Book of the Dead, which are the 11th, 12th, 14th and 15th books in the Kay Scarpetta series (yes, it skips over #13, Trace), each of which sells separately for $7.99. See this earlier post for book descriptions.

Click HERE for to get the EPUB version at Shortcovers.