5 History / Military eBooks

Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth by Suzanne Kelly
River Master: John Wesley Powell's Legendary Exploration of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon by Cecil Kuhne
Neil Philip, "Myths in Minutes"
Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire by Patricia A. McAnany, Norman Yoffee
James Hamilton-Paterson, "Marked for Death: The First War in the Air"

Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth by Suzanne Kelly
English | September 4th, 2015 | ASIN: B014ZT5SP8, ISBN: 144224156X, 0810895811 | 222 Pages | EPUB | 8.92 MB
We once disposed of our dead in earth-friendly ways—no chemicals, biodegradable containers, dust to dust. But over the last 150 years death care has become a toxic, polluting, and alienating industry in the United States.
Today, people are slowly waking up to the possibility of more sustainable and less disaffecting death care, reclaiming old practices in new ways, in a new age. Greening Death traces the philosophical and historical backstory to this awakening, captures the passionate on-the-ground work of the Green Burial Movement, and explores the obstacles and other challenges getting in the way of more robust mobilization. As the movement lays claim to greener, simpler, and more cost-efficient practices, something even more promising is being offered up—a tangible way of restoring our relationship to nature.

River Master: John Wesley Powell's Legendary Exploration of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon by Cecil Kuhne
English | October 31st, 2017 | ASIN: B075TJFSS5, ISBN: 1682680746 | 231 Pages | EPUB | 9.56 MB
Experience John Powel's now-famous expedition through the Grand Canyon!
In 1869, Civil War veteran and amputee Major John Wesley Powell led an expedition down the uncharted Colorado River through the then-nameless Grand Canyon. This is the story of what started as a geological survey, but ended in danger, chaos, and blood. The men were inexperienced and ill-equipped, and they faced unimaginable peril. Along the way there was death, mutiny, and abject terror, but Powell persevered and produced a masterwork of adventure writing still held in the highest regard by the boatmen who follow his course today. With never-before-used primary sources and firsthand experience navigating Powell’s legendary route, Cecil Kuhne brings this remarkable chapter of frontier history to life.
The American Grit series brings you true tales of endurance, survival, and ingenuity from the annals of American history. These books focus on the trials of remarkable individuals with an emphasis on rich primary source material and artwork.

Neil Philip, "Myths in Minutes"
ASIN: B073TW9WLS, ISBN: 1681440628 | 2017 | AZW3 | 400 pages | 72 MB
Myths are the greatest stories ever told. Passed down over millennia, the great myths are the templates for all our stories, with their eternal themes of creation and destruction, fate and cunning, heroism and cruelty, sensuality and war.
Retold here are nearly 200 myths–from Prometheus defying Zeus to create man, to the destruction of Troy; from the reign of the sun god Ra in Egypt to the one-eyed, raven-flanked Odin of the icy North; and from valiant battles against Frost Giants and Cyclopes, to the heroic quests for the Golden Fleece and the Holy Grail–all accompanied by commentaries on their origins, common themes, and meanings.
Compellingly written, concise, and with each myth illustrated with an iconic image, Myths in Minutes is the perfect way to understand and enjoy the world's great fables.

Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire by Patricia A. McAnany, Norman Yoffee
2009 | ISBN: 0521733669, 0521515726 | English | 392 pages | EPUB | 11 MB
Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly "collapsed." Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal "success" and "failure."

James Hamilton-Paterson, "Marked for Death: The First War in the Air"
ISBN: 1681771586, 1681775069 | 2016 | EPUB | 416 pages | 2 MB
A dramatic and fascinating account of aerial combat during World War I, revealing the terrible risks taken by the men who fought and died in the world's first war in the air.
Little more than ten years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. Nearly forgotten in the war's massive overall death toll, some 50,000 aircrew would die in the combatant nations' fledgling air forces.
The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Marked for Death debunks popular myth to explore the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds falling screaming to their deaths; of pilots blinded by the entrails of their observers.
James Hamilton-Paterson also reveals how four years of war produced profound changes both in the aircraft themselves and in military attitudes and strategy. By 1918 it was widely accepted that domination of the air above the battlefield was crucial to military success, a realization that would change the nature of warfare forever.