This month’s list of 100 Kindle Books For $3.99 Or Less includes the following classics priced at $2.99 each:
The Boys From Brazil (4/5 stars)
Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project. Barry Koehler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the scheme and informs famed Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann, but before he can relay the evidence, Koehler is killed.
Thus Ira Levin opens one of the strangest and most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious “Angel of Death”?
One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings—Liebermann, himself aging and thought by some to be losing his grip on reality.
At the heart of The Boys from Brazil lies a frightening contemporary nightmare, chilling and all too possible.
Note that this book was adapted into a film of the same name starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier – it’s currently available in the Amazon Instant Video Store.
The Exorcist 40th Anniversary Edition (4.5/5 stars)
Originally published in 1971, The Exorcist, one of the most controversial novels ever written, went on to become a literary phenomenon: It spent fifty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, seventeen consecutively at number one.
Inspired by a true story of a child’s demonic possession in the 1940s, William Peter Blatty created an iconic novel that focuses on Regan, the eleven-year-old daughter of a movie actress residing in Washington, D.C. A small group of overwhelmed yet determined individuals must rescue Regan from her unspeakable fate, and the drama that ensues is gripping and unfailingly terrifying.
Two years after its publication, The Exorcist was, of course, turned into a wildly popular motion picture, garnering ten Academy Award nominations. On opening day of the film, lines of the novel’s fans stretched around city blocks. In Chicago, frustrated moviegoers used a battering ram to gain entry through the double side doors of a theater. In Kansas City, police used tear gas to disperse an impatient crowd who tried to force their way into a cinema.
The three major television networks carried footage of these events; CBS’s Walter Cronkite devoted almost ten minutes to the story. The Exorcist was, and is, more than just a novel and a film: it is a literary landmark. Purposefully raw and profane, The Exorcist still has the extraordinary ability to disturb readers and cause them to forget that it is “just a story.”
Newly polished and added to by it author and published here in this beautiful fortieth anniversary edition, it remains an unforgettable reading experience and will continue to shock and frighten a new generation of readers.
This book was also adapted into a very popular film starring Ellen Burstyn and Max Von Sydow – it’s currently available in the Amazon Instant Video Store.
Brave New World (4/5 stars)
Huxley’s bleak future prophesized in Brave New World was a capitalist civilization which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years ahead, in “this year of stability, A.F. 632”–the A.F. standing for After Ford, meaning the godlike Henry Ford. “Community, Identity, Stability,” is the motto. Reproduction is controlled through genetic engineering, and people are bred into a rigid class system. As they mature, they are conditioned to be happy with the roles that society has created for them. The rest of their lives are devoted to the pursuit of pleasure through sex, recreational sports, the getting and having of material possessions, and taking a drug called Soma. Concepts such as family, freedom, love, and culture are considered grotesque.
Against this backdrop, a young man known as John the Savage is brought to London from the remote desert of New Mexico. What he sees in the new civilization a “brave new world” (quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest). However, ultimately, John challenges the basic premise of this society in an act that threatens and fascinates its citizens.
Huxley uses his entire prowess to throw the idea of utopia into reverse, presenting us what is known as the “dystopian” novel. When Brave New World was written (1931), neither Hitler nor Stalin had risen to power. Huxley saw the enduring threat to society from the dark side of scientific and social progress, and mankind’s increasing appetite for simple amusement. Brave New World is a work that indicts the idea of progress for progress sake and is backed up with force and reason.
Shoeless Joe (4/5 stars)
Ray Kinsella is sitting quietly on the back porch of his Iowa farm one evening when he hears the ghostly voice of a baseball announcer who says to him, “If you build it, he will come.” Needing no further explanation, Kinsella immediately sees in his mind’s eye a baseball field that he is being asked to create in the middle of a corn field. The voice will speak only two other things to Ray: “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance,” and yet the dreaming, idealistic man knows just what he is supposed to do. He knows that digging up the corn field in the back of his house will inspire the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. So opens the award-winning novel by W.P. Kinsella which was the inspiration for the incredibly popular film Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner.
W.P. Kinsella has been called a great writer of baseball novels but this title transcends that description. Kinsella doesn’t merely treat baseball as a subject in and of itself; instead, he uses it as a metaphor to discuss larger issues such as innocence, belief, and perhaps above all of these things, America. Shoeless Joe is a parable about one of the most fundamental American ideals: beginning anew.
By plowing up a large section of his farmland, Ray Kinsella is both building and rebuilding, creating what has never been as well as re-creating in a sense what had come before. The land had been a place where past sins could be expunged and a new vision realized. It is exactly this sort of renewal that Kinsella’s quixotic creation brings about. Most importantly, this is a story about renewal and redress of trauma and sins of the past.
Shoeless Joe is #47 on the Sports Illustrated Greatest 100 Sports books.
This book was adapted into what many consider the greatest sports movie of all time, Field of Dreams – it’s currently available in the Amazon Instant Video Store.
Click here to browse the full list of this month’s 100 Kindle Books For $3.99 Or Less.