Friday, May 10, 2013

Free Kindle Books 5-10-13

PLEASE. Do everyone a favor and write an Amazon review if you end up reading a book (or trying to and giving up in disgust). It does not have to be much. Just tell what you think of the book.

From the top 100 free list

Run
[#5. From an author regularly on the list. Its 4th day on the list.]

101 best jokes
[Remains on the list at #42.]

DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)
A DYING MAN’S GREATEST TREASURE…

Mortimer Moorecook, retired Wall Street raider, avid collector, is losing his fight against cancer. With weeks to live, a package arrives at the door of his hillside mansion—an artifact he paid millions for…a hominoid skull with elongated teeth, discovered in a farmer’s field in the Romanian countryside. With Shanna, his beautiful research assistant looking on, he sinks the skull’s razor sharp fangs into his neck, and immediately goes into convulsions.

OPENS THE DOOR TO AN ANCIENT EVIL...

A rural hospital. A slow night in the ER. Until Moorecook arrives strapped to a gurney, where he promptly codes and dies.

WHERE DEATH IS JUST THE BEGINNING.

Four well-known horror authors pool their penchants for scares and thrills, and tackle one of the greatest of all legends, with each writer creating a unique character and following them through a vampire outbreak in a secluded hospital.

The goal was simple: write the most intense novel they possibly could.

Which they did.

A Word of Warning:

Within these pages, you will find no black capes, no satin-lined coffins, no brooding heartthrobs who want to talk about your feelings. Forget sunlight and stakes. Throw out your garlic and your crosses. This is the Anti-TWILIGHT.

NOTE: DRACULAS is a full length novel, 80,000 words long. But this ebook is also brimming with an additional 80,000 words of extras and bonuses:

- a clickable table of contents
- a round-robin interview with Strand, Wilson, Crouch, and Kilborn about writing DRACULAS
- deleted scenes
- two alternate endings
- four excerpts from the authors’ other works
- the short story “Serial” by Crouch and Kilborn
- the short story “Cub Scout Gore Feast” by Kilborn and Strand
- the short story “A Sound of Blunder” by Kilborn and Wilson
- author biographies
- comprehensive clickable bibliographies
- an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the writing of DRACULAS, delivered through a collection of over seven hundred emails between the writers as they were brainstorming and writing the book

5 star:(130)
4 star:(77)
3 star:(17)
2 star:(11)
1 star:(6)

[#44. Several of the co-authors of this book are regularly on the top 100 free list. What I have read of their work I generally liked.]

Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century
[#62. Its 19th day on the list. This one is definitely not for everyone, but as an electrical engineer, it caught my eye. I read one of the lesser rated reviews that seems to indicate the book is more of a shill for a web site than it is a book about Tesla. I will be disappointed if that is the case. However, it has managed to stay on the list a long time so that may mean there is some substance there.]

The Mating (Law of the Lycans)
[Still on the list at #69.]

King's X
[#77. Its 3rd day on the list.]

The Keeping (Sequel to The Mating)
[Remains on the list at #94.]

From the AR15.com free book thread

Eastern Front Combat: The German Soldier in Battle from Stalingrad to Berlin (Stackpole Military History Series)
Appearing for the first time in English, these are first-person accounts by German soldiers who fought in bloody combat on the Eastern Front in World War II. Includes stories from a panzer crewman who survived the fighting at Stalingrad--as well as a paratrooper making a last stand before Berlin. Many of the photos have never been published before.

5 star:(4)
4 star:(2)
3 star:(2)
2 star:(2)
1 star:(1)

[I have had some good luck with Stackpole books, but some not not so much. At free, maybe worth a look.]

Joshua Chamberlain: A Hero's Life and Legacy
"Joshua Chamberlain was much more than a war hero, and Pullen's thoughtful book fills out the picture of his remarkable life. An entertaining and inspiring story." --Senator George J. Mitchell

5 star:(6)
4 star:(1)
3 star:(2)
2 star:(0)
1 star:(0)

[Joshua Chamberlain's defense of Little Round Top may well have saved the Union, but gets little in the way of mention in common history books. His story is well worth reading.]

Rome and the Arabs Before the Rise of Islam
In this book, historian Dr. Greg Fisher discusses the relationship between the Roman Empire and its Arab allies in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. He examines the political and military alliances between the two groups and the role of Christianity in creating shared allegiances and loyalty. He also analyses the role of language and culture in building 'identity' for the Arabs before the emergence of Islam. The book also considers the relationship between the Empire of Sasanian Iran and its own Arab allies at al-Hirah in Iraq, and the role played by the kingdoms of Himyar (Yemen), and Axum (Ethiopia), in the wider world of superpower competition in the dying days of Rome's Middle Eastern empire.

Greg Fisher is Assistant Professor of Roman History in the Department of History & College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of numerous scholarly works on antiquity, including Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2011).

[I enjoy history of this period so I might well like this book. Being a scholarly work though, sometime these kind of books are tough to read.]

A Line in the Sand (The American War)
The year is 2031. The US military has been gutted by an increasingly powerful and isolationist government after a series of unpopular and internationally condemned wars. Lieutenant Colonel Reese Sterling, a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iran, has been falsely imprisoned after tragedy occurs during a botched raid in his home. He is sent to the infamous Ridgeway Prison on trumped up charges, and while incarcerated, meets a mysterious man who has a plan for freedom. Across the country, a popular US President is assassinated, along with a high-ranking member of the Chinese military. Sterling manages to escape from prison, only to find that he is the man being hunted as the presidential assassin. Balancing his desire for revenge against the need to clear his name, Sterling must take on a conspiracy of global proportions that threatens to bring the very foundations of the nation crashing down. When war on American soil for the first time in over 150 years seems imminent, the fugitive officer must make a brutal choice; to fight against the government he had sworn an oath to protect, or do nothing and see the country torn apart.

5 star:(11)
4 star:(8)
3 star:(0)
2 star:(1)
1 star:(0)
 
[This was also free back in December. I got it then, started reading it and never finished. Don't recall much about it other than it seemed kind of far fetched. I didn't write a review on it so I probably intended to go back to it and just never got around to doing so.]

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