Free books: History & Biography
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012)
I suppose this book poses the question: What does the Administration want you to know about the most sensitive issues, like the relationship with Pakistan and their terrifying nuclear arsenal?As near as I can make out, Sanger is relying almost exclusively on official sources. Now, he's got great ...
Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-And Revolutionized an Industry (2009)
Broken up into into 100+ 1-3 page sections, very readable. Nice to get some historical context on what is was like before SaaS was the default. Lots of detail on:- marketing- recruiting- sales process- company scaling- international expansion- customer focusBrief bits on - financing- going public...
De jacht op de Mona Lisa (2000)
It was an interesting fictional take on thwarting an attempt by Goebbels to steal the Mona Lisa and use it as a bargaining chip to get him out of Europe and to Argentina before the Nazi surrender. Unfortunately the authors attempt to capture the dialogue of WWII France came off as sounding much t...
Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (2010)
A fine book that does an admirable job of articulating the mischaracterizations of the new atheist's claims about the Bible. I don't agree with everything he says, nor do I agree with all of his conclusions, but over all a good job. His discussion of Moses and Abraham struck me as a bit off kil...
¿Cómo se sale de aquí? (2010)
This book is important in that it provides a context for how we as a culture have come to view childbirth in the various ways that we do - our concepts of this important stage of a woman's life is framed by the society in which we live, as well as the societies that have come before. Many people ...
The Norman Conquest (2012)
I enjoy history, military history and the study of it because of the value in teaching future generations of military personal general ideas and giving them perspective. This book is a true history book in that it is rather dry and boring. I feel the author may have benifited if he had focused mo...
The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici (2011)
[I think I should put a trigger warning here, because I talk a bit below about my reaction to the author's portrayals of sexual violence.]I really enjoyed getting the various legends straightened out with this biography. It's easy to see why Caterina Sforza's "famous last stand" story is so iconi...
Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV (2010)
Is this book a past selection from a freshman "Media Studies 101" survey course? Was the course taught by a militant feminist grad student at State U? It sure felt like it. The author wasted 300+ pages repeatedly positing the same argument, namely that reality television is sexist, classist an...
Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (2006)
Kleist graphic novel covers the biography of Johnny Cash, yet at times it seems the work meanders. The work taps into Cash’s earlier life, from Depression-era childhood to the Folsom performance. There are time jumps in the novel, which some may find initially confusing. The novel ends in Cash’s ...
Traitors of the Tower (2010)
ISBN? - 9780099542285General Subject/s? - History / Executions / Tudors / Wars of the Roses / Sixteenth CenturyTitle? - This book is a very short introduction to the most famous executions that happened in the Tower of London.General Analysis? - A very very very short introduction. It literally j...
The Most They Ever Had [With Headphones] (2009)
This book was painful for me to read, in some ways, because I grew up in north Alabama and this book chronicles the history of some of "my people". Parts of my family did move from working the cotton on other people's land, to working in the new factories that promised so much. Nonetheless, it ...
The Tigress of Forli (2000)
Really interesting bio on a woman who would have been cool to meet. Lev created an atmosphere of story in her writing that isn't seen much in historical biographies. That's a shame because it really worked here. She also excluded the "as professor Thaddeus McOvereducated stated in his book..." by...
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (2008)
When asked by a friend why he had never married, Santayana replied, "I don't know whether to get married or buy a dog." His conservator and former assistant, Daniel Cory, writes..."..and he drank three glasses of wine with his food. (It always astonished me the way he poured any leftover wine on...
Deadly Waters: Inside the Hidden World of Somalia's Pirates (2011)
Interesting overview of the Somali pirate industry, the author showing that the brigands of the Horn of Africa are much less professional or organized as what is often assumed. Bahadur shows that the often invoked root cause for these Somalis reverting to piracy, illegal foreign fishing off the S...
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (2011)
"و هكذا فإن تحقق الديمقراطيه بالخارج شأن عظيم بالنسبة لنا ، فقط حينما يتصادف و يريد شعب البلد الذي في سبيله الى التحول الديمقراطي اتباع السياسات التي تروق لنا و تطبيقها ، اما ان كان لدى أحد الشعوب الأجنبيه نزعات و رغبات تتعارض مع مصالحنا فإن الوسيله الفضلى المتاحه أمامنا هي إبقاءه خاضعا مستعبدا ل...