Here are just a few of the great deals in History on this month’s list of Kindle Books Priced At $3.99 Or Less:
The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
An upstart French duke who sets out to conquer the most powerful and unified kingdom in Christendom. An invasion force on a scale not seen since the days of the Romans. One of the bloodiest and most decisive battles ever fought.
This new history explains why the Norman Conquest was the most significant cultural and military episode in English history. Assessing the original evidence at every turn, Marc Morris goes beyond the familiar outline to explain why England was at once so powerful and yet so vulnerable to William the Conqueror’s attack; why the Normans, in some respects less sophisticated, possessed the military cutting edge; how William’s hopes of a united Anglo-Norman realm unraveled, dashed by English rebellions, Viking invasions, and the insatiable demands of his fellow conquerors. This is a tale of powerful drama, repression, and seismic social change: the Battle of Hastings itself; the sudden introduction of castles and the massive rebuilding of every major church; the total destruction of an ancient ruling class. Language, law, architecture, and even attitudes toward life itself were altered forever by the coming of the Normans.
Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
Action-packed and breathtakingly authentic, Viper Pilot is the electrifying memoir of one of the most decorated F-16 pilots in American history: U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hampton, who served for twenty years, flying missions in the Iraq War, the Kosovo conflict, and the first Gulf War.
Both a rare look into the elite world of fighter pilots and a thrilling first-person account of contemporary air combat, Viper Pilot soars—a true story of courage, skill, and commitment that will thrill U.S. Special Forces buffs, aviation and military history aficionados, and fans of the novels of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown.
Red Plenty (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
“Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous.” —The Times (London)
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Red Plenty is history, it’s fiction, it’s as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again.
A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller Red Horizons, Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. to find his former spy chief and kill him. They failed. On Christmas Day 1989, Ceausescu was executed by his own people at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of Red Horizons.Today, still living undercover in the United States, the man credited by the CIA as the only person in the Western world who single-handedly demolished an entire enemy espionage service–the one he himself managed–takes aim at an even bigger target: the exotic, widely misunderstood but still astonishingly influential realm of the Russian-born “science” of disinformation.
Indeed, within these pages, Pacepa, along with his co-author, historian and law professor Ronald Rychlak, expose some of the most consequential yet largely unknown disinformation campaigns of our lifetime. Here the reader will discover answers to many crucial questions of the modern era: Why, during the last two generations, has so much of the Western world turned against its founding faith, Christianity? Why have radical Islam, jihad and terrorism burst aflame after a long period of apparent quiescence? Why is naked Marxism increasingly manifesting in America and its NATO allies? What really happened to Russia after the Berlin Wall came down? Like the solution to a giant jigsaw puzzle lacking one crucial piece, Disinformation authoritatively provides the missing dimension that makes the chaos of the modern world finally understandable.By its very nature, a disinformation campaign can work only if the seemingly independent Western press accepts intentionally fabricated lies and presents them to the public as truth.
Thus, Pacepa and Rychlak also document how the U.S. “mainstream media’s” enduring sympathy for all things liberal-left has made it vulnerable to–indeed, the prime carrier of–civilization-transforming campaigns of lying, defamation and historical revisionism that turn reality on its head. In Disinformation, you’ll discover: How destroying the reputation of good leaders has been developed into a high art and science. How Pope Pius XII –a generation ago the world’s most high-profile Christian leader, who personally saved countless Jews from Hitler’s Holocaust–was transformed, through the magic of disinformation, into a Nazi sympathizer. How Christianity and Judaism have been targeted for constant denigration and defamation through an ongoing campaign of disinformation. How the Soviet bloc planted 4,000 agents of influence in the Islamic world, armed with hundreds of thousands of copies of the most infamous anti-Semitic book in history, to fan the flames of ancient Arab resentments against the U.S. and Israel and sow the seeds of anti-Semitism that would later bloom in the form of violence and terror toward Jews and Christians.
How the defamatory attacks on American soldiers John Kerry made before Congress upon his return from Vietnam–charges later discredited and repudiated–were identical to a contemporaneous KGB disinformation campaign concocted to turn Americans against their own leaders. How supposedly respectable institutions like the World Council of Churches have long been infiltrated and controlled by Russian intelligence. How much of the world came to believe that the U.S. government itself masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. How the Soviet Union has been transformed into the first intelligence dictatorship in history. How disinformation is still very much alive in the age of Obama, remaining a powerful engine in the ongoing socialist transformation of America.All this and much more is meticulously documented in Disinformation, with the credibility of an eyewitness who was not only there, but actively involved as a Soviet bloc spy chief–who, thanks to a crisis of conscience, “left the dark side” and came to America to help shine a light on the greatest source of political evil of the modern age.
“This remarkable book will change the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press, and much else besides.” – R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence
Click here to browse the full list of this month’s Kindle Books Priced At $3.99 Or Less.