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'Tis the season — every year at this time — for the various renderings of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This year, the current animated version in the cinema — starring a computer-generated Jim Carrey in multiple roles — has won some plaudits for sticking with the spirit of the Dickens original. So it might come as some surprise to learn that when Dickens himself performed A Christmas Carol, he didn't do it as it's written. And during this holiday season, you can see the proof. In a small glass case at the New York Public Library, there sits...

Introductory Remarks: On December 7, 1941, U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii were attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Could this tragic event that resulted in over 3,000 Americans killed and injured in a single two-hour attack have been averted? After 16 years of uncovering documents through the Freedom of Information Act, journalist and historian Robert Stinnett charges in his book, Day of Deceit, that U.S. government leaders at the highest level not only knew that a Japanese attack was imminent, but that they had deliberately engaged in policies intended to provoke the attack, in order to draw...

I apologize in advance for the vanity, but I'd like to request some of the talents of the folks on Free Republic to assist in proofreading public domain books for Project Gutenberg.  Project Gutenberg is the original internet site for the publication and distribution of books that are a part of the public domain, and as such have no copyright. PG has published over 30,000 ebooks for free download in a variety of formats for anyone with an internet connection to enjoy at their leisure. The Distributed Proofers are producing over a hundred books a month for publication and, like...

A first edition of Charles Darwin's seminal "On the Origin of Species" will be sold this week after it was found in a family's toilet in southern Britain, an auction house said Sunday. The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie's auction house said. The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said. The book will go under the hammer in London on Tuesday, to coincide with the...

In the Battle of the Health Bills, the Senate wins out, bulk-wise – weighing in at 2,074 pages. The House health reform bill was a mere 1,990 pages when introduced. That means the Senate bill -- like the one in the House -- runs more pages than War and Peace, and has nearly five times as many words as the Torah. The table of contents alone is 14 pages.

While information on Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader, the Nook, has been trickling out for several days, the company unveiled the new $259 device on its Web site Tuesday a few hours before the official launch event in New York. As previously reported, the Nook, billed as the first Android-powered e-book reader, features not only a 6-inch E-ink screen but a color touch screen that allows you to navigate content and also can turn into a virtual keyboard for searches. Like the Kindle, the Nook has a built-in 3G wireless connection (AT&T is the carrier). However, the Nook also...

Book seller Barnes & Noble is expected to announce its own e-reader next week, and a new report states the device will sport both black-and-white e-ink and a multi-touch, iPhone-like color display. New information and photos of the device were provided to Gizmodo, which revealed that a majority of the device will have a traditional e-ink display, much like the Amazon Kindle, which provides superior battery life. It will be a 6-inch screen with an 800x600 pixel resolution. But the bottom portion of the device will have an LCD color display sporting multi-touch technology. It will be used to browse...

Many years ago, I went to the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London to keep an appointment with the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark. He was the son of Kenneth (later Lord) Clark—the art historian and author of the Civilisation series—and the heir to Saltwood Castle, in Kent. He was also the author of a 1961 book, The Donkeys, which was a history of the British General Staff in the First World War. The title came from a famous comment that had supposedly been made at that epoch by a German military strategist. Told by...

Commentary: Behemoth cuts prices on its Kindle e-book reader SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Amazon.com Inc. cut prices on its Kindle electronic book reader for the second time in three months, gearing up to stave off the looming competition from a host of new e-readers about to descend on the market.

Trailer for "The Pacific", the HBO series on the war in the Pacific during WWII

Sarah Palin's most consequential choice since leaving the Alaska governor's mansion may be her co-author - a staunch conservative, devoted evangelical Christian, and intensely partisan Republican from far, far outside the Beltway. Lynn Vincent spent the summer working with Palin on a closely-guarded 400 page memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Life." The book is due out from HarperCollins November 17 - but it shot to the top of the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists Wednesday as word of its publication spread. Vincent's past projects include co-writing the memoir of General William Boykin, who blasted the media and President...

Is it possible to really win the war on terror? Are there really reasons for Jihad that can be understood and countered by the West? Is military or martial action the last-best chance for ending the threat posed by Islam? In his new and controversial book, Babylon’s Covert War, the author answers these and other complex questions related to the global fight against radical Jihad. Islam has a strategy that was incorporated by Muhammad in the 7th Century that has continued in various forms over a multitude of battlefields be they military, social, or political. During the emergence of Islamic...

For someone who might have missed some classics or have just decided to stop being a DUmmie... what free ebooks would you recommend? From any source, could be from Mises "library" or from Gutenberg. Links if you got them!

Speaking w/a pal and coworker who actually stated that communism might not be a bad idea for our country. I asked if that I gave him a book if he'd read it - he agreed - and the book I opted for is Human Action by L v Mises. Do you Freepers think this a good choice on my part?

IN PURSUIT OF LIBERTY: COMING OF AGE IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION By Emmy E. Werner Potomac Books, $17.95, 190 pages Reviewed by James Srodes Too often books about children are written in an infantile voice as if the audience is somehow unable to read adult themes unless the prose is watered down. Happily, the book at hand is a compelling history that is both clearly written and a riveting experience for both adults and young people who are interested in Revolutionary War history from a different perspective. The story of young people, even children, in our War for Independence has...

Review: How the Byzantines Saved Europe Posted by JOHN COURETAS on MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2009 The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, Robin Cormack. Oxford University Press (2008)Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin. Princeton University Press (2008) Ask the average college student to identify the 1,100 year old empire that was, at various points in its history, the political, commercial, artistic and ecclesiastical center of Europe and, indeed, was responsible for the very survival and flourishing of what we know today as Europe and you’re not likely to get the...

A Library of Congress curator is on a worldwide mission to find exact copies of the books that belonged to Thomas Jefferson For more than a decade, Mark Dimunation has led a quest to rebuild an American treasure—knowing he will likely never see the complete results of his efforts. On an August day 195 years ago, the British burned the U.S. Capitol in the War of 1812 and by doing so, destroyed the first Library of Congress. When the war ended, former President Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library, which at 6,487 books was the largest in America,...

When William Golding, the author of the coming of age allegorical classic 'Lord of the Flies', died in 1993 little was known of his personal life. This has changed due to the resurfacing of an autobiography written by Golding for his wife in order to explain how his character developed. John Carey, the literary critic and an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford has gained access to the reclusive author's previously unseen archive which includes two autobiographical works, three unpublished novels and a journal spanning twenty years. As released on the Times Online, amongst the revelations is an admittance...

COLLINSVILLE -- Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville. Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead. Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive...

home | about spiked | issues | support spiked Friday 26 June 2009Restating the case for human uniquenessA brilliant new book cuts through all the media-oriented research about ‘clever chimps’ using tools, doing maths and feeling emotions, and reminds us that, in truth, there is nothing remotely human about primates.Helene Guldberg Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human is a refreshing defence of human uniqueness. ‘We are a truly exceptional primate with minds that are genuinely discontinuous to other animals’, Jeremy Taylor writes. The first half of Not a Chimp challenges ‘the basis...

The so-called New Atheists are attacking the mantra of science and faith being compatible. Others in the science community question the value of confrontation.This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution," as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United...

Well, it's time again for my quarterly "What Are You Reading Now?" thread. I do this thread to gauge what other Freepers are reading. As all of you know, Freepers are probably some of the more well-read individuals on the Internet and I'm always curious as to what we're reading. It can be anything, a classic work of fiction, a NY Times bestseller, a technical journal, a trashy pulp novel...in short anything. Please do not ruin this thread by replying "I'm reading this thread". It become un-funny a long time ago. I'll start. I'm about halfway thru "The Horrid Pit:...

Notes of a Course of Lectures on Vattel's Law of Nations (1891) Author: James Houston Gilmore , Emer de Vattel Publisher: J. Blakey] Year: 1891 Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT Language: English Digitizing sponsor: Google Book contributor: University of Virginia Collection: americana http://www.archive.org/details/notesacourselec00vattgoog ___________________________________________________________________ The law of nations; or, Principles of the law of nature, applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns. From the French of Monsieur de Vattel ... From the new ed. (1855) Author: Vattel, Emer de, 1714-1767; Chitty, Joseph, 1776-1841, ed; Ingraham, Edward D. (Edward Duncan), 1793-1854, ed Subject: International law; War (International law) Publisher:...

A Collection of Papers, which Passed Between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz ... (1717) Author: Samuel Clarke , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Publisher: printed for James Knapton Year: 1717 Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT Language: English Digitizing sponsor: Google Book contributor: Oxford University Collection: europeanlibraries Notes: A gentleman of the University of Cambridge = John Bulkeley http://www.archive.org/details/acollectionpape00leibgoog

Blackstone's Commentaries Author: William Blackstone, William Cyrus Sprague Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT Language: English Digitizing sponsor: Google Book contributor: unknown library Collection: americana http://www.archive.org/details/blackstonescomm00unkngoog ___________________________________________________________________ Abridgment of Blackstone's Commentaries (1893) Author: William Blackstone , William Cyrus Sprague , William Blackstone Collection (Library of Congress) Publisher: Sprague CorrespondenceSchool of Law Year: 1893 Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT Language: English Digitizing sponsor: Google Book contributor: unknown library Collection: americana http://www.archive.org/details/abridgmentblack00conggoog ___________________________________________________________________ An interesting appendix to Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England (MDCCLXXIII [1773]) Author: Blackstone, William, Sir, 1723-1780; Blackstone, William, Sir, 1723-1780; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Blackstone, William, Sir, 1723-1780; Priestley,...

BC: Why do so many leftists believe that political issues are black and white in nature and revolve around good versus evil? Harry Stein: The obvious answer's that, since they speak almost exclusively to one another, this is all they hear; in the case of many, who’ve come of age in a culture and educational system dominated by Sixties vets, pretty much all they’ve ever heard. For liberals, the left of center position on a vast range of issues – abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, taxation, even national security – is not merely the correct position, it is the moral...

Sony's e-book store now has more than 1 million titles Sony today announced that there are more than 1 million public domain books available through the Google Books project, as Sony continues to battle with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. "We are committed to ensuring our customers have the freedom to discover and read content from the widest possible range of sources,” Sony eBook Store Director Chris Smythe said in a statement.  “We’re proud to offer access to the broadest range of eBooks today – from hot new releases, to New York Times Best Sellers, to classics and hard to...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Sergeant at Arms Terry Gainer, the top administrative official for the chamber, says that six teenage Senate pages have "turned up with flu-like symptoms," though there is no hard evidence yet that the pages have contracted the H1N1 virus. Gainer described the symptoms as "mild," including a runny nose and a sore throat. He indicated that there was "no panic" in the Senate. At this stage, doctors do not test to determine whether it is the H1N1 flu, Gainer said, adding that's consistent with national policy. Four of the pages are roommates and have been restricted to...

British historian Andrew Roberts has claimed in a new book -- The Storm of War -- that wrong clothing and not ghastly wintry conditions led to Germany's defeat in Russia in 1941. In an extract from his new book, Roberts claims that Hitler's troops were fatally ill equipped for the 1941 invasion of Russia. He also blames dictator Adolf Hitler for that defeat, saying the Nazi leader failed to take care of his troops' needs and was more proud of his hardiness in the cold, boasting how "having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me." Prior...

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest...

Has anyone else read these two books? Lights out is a free pdf book and one secon after is in book form. I have read both of them and would like to know if anyone else has and what your thoughts are on them.

When I read MA Khan's new book, Islamic Jihad, I was struck by two things, the high quality of his scholarship and an emerging historical trend. Khan is firmly in the Foundationalist School of scholarship. He does not indulge opinion, but bases his work on the Islamic doctrine of jihad and its historical effects on civilization, with a focus on the destruction of India. He investigates and documents two little known areas--the Sufis and the enslavement of the Hindus. The excellence of his book is part of an historic pattern. When Islam attacked us on September 11, 2001 we were...

Owners of Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books - downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users - were remotely deleted after what the US company says was a request by the publisher, MobileReference.com. Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase". "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store," a...

I haven't seen a good summer reading thread, so I thought I'd start one. What books have you read so far this summer, what are you currently reading, and what is in your book stack? I just started reading The Doomsday Key by James Rollins. So far it has an interesting premise, genetically altered foods, but I am only about 1/8 of the way through. I will probably read Glenn Beck's Common Sense and maybe Dred Scott's Revenge by Judge Napolitano. I love hearing what everyone else is reading!

A new U.S. book claims Ernest Hemingway was a not-very-effective spy for the KGB during the 1940s. The Nobel prize-winning author is listed in "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America," Yale University Press, co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev from notes Vassiliev took in Moscow archives. A former KGB officer, Vassiliev was provided with access in the 1990s to Stalin-era files, The Guardian reported. In the book, Hemingway is referred to as a "dilettante spy." His file says he was recruited in 1941 before he went to China, the book claims. He...

A nephew of mine is doing some project/study work on the Great Depression. I have tons of history books, but very little on economical history and the Great Depression. I'd like him to avoid Roosevelt adulating propaganda. What do you consider the authorative and most relevant books on the Great Depression and the (etatist) measures certain States (particularily US and Europeans) have taken against it? Thanks for your help.

Glenn Beck's Common Sense has hit the #1 spot on the USA Today Best-Selling list and will hit #1 on the July 5th New York Times Best Sellers list, making Beck one of just a few authors in history to hit #1 on the New York Times fiction, non-fiction and paperback original bestseller lists. Beck's Common Sense is joined on the NYT paperback non-fiction bestseller list by An Inconvenient Book at #4, giving him two books in the top 5. And Beck's not slowing down. His next book, the hardcover non-fiction Arguing With Idiots, will be published by Threshold Editions...

In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History, Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism's unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a "unified Hinduism." She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a "British-Brahmin version of Hinduism - one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries." These "bad Hindus" are accused of having an inferiority...

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. ....................... In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the...

2008 Nebula Awards

(April 28) - Frank Beckmann talks with Paul Rahe. He holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and has authored four books, about despotism and President Obama's friendship with dictators. He is the author of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect

Literary agent Carmen Balcells said she doesn't expect to see any more books from Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "I don't think that Garcia Marquez will write anything else," said Barcells in an interview with the daily La Tercera in which she added that the Colombian writer represented 36.2 per cent of her literary agency's billing. Echoing Balcells was Briton Gerald Martin, the writer of the only authorised biography of Garcia Marquez. "I don't believe either that Gabo will write any more books, although it doesn't seem very regrettable to me because as a writer it was his fate to...

As Gavin Weightman's "The Industrial Revolutionaries" reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup's importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries -- what Mr. Weightman calls "the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history." ... The steam engine, first made practical by Thomas Newcomen and then made vastly more fuel efficient by James Watt, made work-doing energy cheap for the first time in human history. With the steam engine, factories could be located where labor was most available, and Britain's urban industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, quickly expanded....

Welcome to BookCrossing, where 761,808 people in over 130 countries come to share their passion for books with the world. Where books take on a life of their own. How? It's easy. Simply click on the link below and sign up for free in less than 1 minute-- that's it! BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure. Leave it on a...

BLACK REDNECKS AND WHITE LIBERALS. Can't wait to get this one! Comes out next month!!

For the past two weeks, with a big hat tip to Dr. Helen Smith who diagnosed the phenomenon last fall, we’ve had a fascinating and spirited discussion here about the “Going Galt” movement that’s catching on nationwide. There’s now even a Twitter hashtag for the phenomenon: #goinggalt. My email box (especially after publication of my recent syndicated column on the subject) continues to fill up with letters from readers choosing in large and small ways to go Galt. Reader Ron Ruffer of Pa. e-mails: Dear Ms. Malkin, First I would like to say that I very much enjoy your commentary...

About a year ago, a writer for one of the town's less-than-every-day papers infamously reported with regret that the Reading Room bookstore at Mandalay Place inside the Mandalay Bay was closing, leaving Las Vegas without any independent booksellers. Las Vegas was not and still is not without independent booksellers, needless to say, and I'm not merely talking about the Philadelphia-based (and markedly upscale) Bauman's Rare Books, which moved into Sheldon Adelson's Palazzo last year. Check out www.usedbookslasvegas.com/Open_Shops.html.

Richard J. Evans's new book "The Third Reich at War," which covers 1939 through 1945, is the final installment of his critically acclaimed history of Nazi Germany. Mr. Evans, who holds the Regius Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, began his trilogy when he decided that there was no survey of the Nazi era that he could recommend. Like his previous books, "The Coming of the Third Reich" (2003) and "The Third Reich in Power" (2005), "The Third Reich at War" incorporates a wide range of primary sources, from the personal papers of German generals to the...

In the new book "BIGFOOT DECLASSIFIED" by M.P. Raymond, life in America is beginning to change and the author takes us on a unique journey in a world where Bigfoot is real and becoming a part of American culture. Through modern secretive technology and the acquiring of several specimens, BIGFOOT is now a documented species. This is the only approved government text that focuses on understanding and controlling the legendary creature. * Read harrowing stories of Bigfoot encounters throughout the world, and how this avalanche of information has overtaken man. See how it all started and why this government manual...

Google Inc. is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony Corp.'s electronic book-reading device, the companies were set to announce Thursday. It's the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books.The scanned books were all published before 1923, and include works like Charles Dickens'"A Tale of Two Cities" as well as nonfiction classics like Herodotus'"The Histories."The books are already available as free downloads in...