Free books: History & Biography
The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2011)
What we now associate with Timothy Leary - LSD, Grateful Dead concerts, hippies, tuning in and dropping out, first started out as psychological experiments at Harvard University. Leary, a charismatic and well-liked professor, hoped to help inmates rehabilitate by giving them mystical experiences ...
Zondervan NIV Study Bible (2010)
I don't know that one has much choice but to rate this book highly. Even if you are not a religious person, it is one of the most diverse, thought-provoking and influential books of all time. As a professing Christian it has even more significance to me . . . This is my third or fourth time rea...
Gingersnap (2013)
Benjamin Torres9/29/14Period 3/4 Gingersnap Gingersnap was a great book. I gave it 3 stars because it had good details in the chapter, but sometimes in the end of a chapter, ther...
The Woman Who Heard Color (2011)
Extraordinary!!! Such richness and clarity combined in storytelling is rare. The Woman Who Heard Color is forcing me to reexamine and revise what I've given 5 stars to in the past. I really did feel like I was living alongside the characters in this novel, particularly following Hanna through the...
The Candy Bombers (2008)
A few weeks ago I asked my friends for recommendations of WWII books I should read and this one was at the top of the list. It's long, and not necessarily an easy read, but the author does a fantastic job explaining post-war politics and the events surrounding the Berlin Air Lift. He weaves the p...
Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work (2012)
A collection of essays, most originally published in GQ or Smithsonian, that explore the "hidden" lives and jobs that keep America running. These include coal miners, landfill workers, air traffic controllers, migrant laborers picking berries, cattle ranchers, a long distance trucker, and workers...
Take Action Bible, NKJV: Together We Can Change the World (2011)
Take Action Bible NKJVWant to be more active in your faith and be inspired by others stories of action, then this is the perfect Bible for you. This New King James Version Bible reads like similar Bibles, yet has stories of people from around the world who are making a difference in the Body of ...
Hidden America From Coal Miners to Cowboys an Extraordinary Exploration (2012)
Should be required read for all middle to upper class HS students to explain working class blue collar underpinnings of economy. This segment of our population gets further detached from how "stuff" happens or is made each generation. For all our technology & progress we still have and should app...
First Muslim : Story of Muhammad: The Story of Muhammad (2014)
Either Muhammad was destined to be a Prophet in which case it didn't matter who Muhammad was, under what conditions he lived, in what time he lived or there was something which made Muhammad the Prophet. The book is a biography of Muhammad's life, his actions and his teachings. It also briefly an...
White Sands, Red Menace (2008)
This book wasn't as deep as I wanted it to be, but I enjoyed it mainly for the glimpse it provided of Dewey and Suze in their lives post-Los Alamos. I wanted to see more repercussions in the lives of scientists who created the atomic bomb and while there were moments that offered that, it wasn't ...
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (2014)
Every year I tell my 7th graders the story of the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his family. Every year they are mesmorized by the tale and want to hear more. The reason that junior high students sit on the edge of their seats as they listen to a story about a family that died almost 100 y...
The Women Who Heard Color (2000)
Best thing about this book was the art it mentioned and since I read it on my iPad I was about to quickly search for paintings and artists. The story is weak a poor country-girl (Catholic) marries her Jewish art-dealer employer in the 1920s in Munich. She is then swept up in the war and becomes i...
A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (2014)
While this book didn't tell me anything I didn't know, it granted me the data as cold, hard facts that were like a slap in the face. No supposition - this is reality in the world at large and the author's indignation became my own. But the problem is that this book will hardly stir those that s...
Patria senza Dio. Cosa possono insegnarci sulla contentezza le nazioni meno religiose (2008)
At the outset, I admire Phil Zuckerman for squeezing this additional project on top of his original assignment in Denmark and Sweden.I benefited enormously from this book as it provided affirmation of my own views of the direction in which societies should evolve. The author interviews people fro...
Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010)
This was kind of neat, and was different from my usual reading choices. I learned a bit from it, and I generally liked the author's voice. It gets into a wee bit too much detail at times, but that's not a bit deal. Wells looks at human development since the dawn of agriculture rather than bein...