King Coal - by Upton Sinclair

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Upton Sinclair is an American writer who wrote many novels.  His best known works were about social injustice towards the working man.

Time Magazine said he was "a man with every gift except humor and silence."  

A US Amazon Reader Reviewer says, " If you have ever had a job, or ever will, this is a book you should read. The concepts explored in this book matter today as much as the day it was written to every working person. It's short, easy to get through, and I promise you'll never forget this story."

So let's see what he has to say about the coal industry in his 1917 novel "King Coal." (US Edition)  (UK Edition) 

Our hero spends the day walking up a mountain only to be told there is no work:

It really seemed an absurdly illogical proceeding, to post a notice, "Hands Wanted," in conspicuous places on the roadside, causing a man to climb thirteen miles up a mountain canyon, only to be turned off without explanation. Hal was convinced that there must be jobs inside the stockade, and that if only he could get at the bosses he could persuade them. He got up and walked down the road a quarter of a mile, to where the railroad-track crossed it, winding up the canyon. A train of "empties" was passing, bound into the camp, the cars rattling and bumping as the engine toiled up the grade. This suggested a solution of the difficulty.

It was already growing dark. Crouching slightly, Hal approached the cars, and when he was in the shadows, made a leap and swung onto one of them. It took but a second to clamber in, and he lay flat and waited, his heart thumping.

Before a minute had passed he heard a shout, and looking over, he saw the Cerberus of the gate running down a path to the track, his companion, Bill, just behind him. "Hey! come out of there!" they yelled; and Bill leaped, and caught the car in which Hal was riding.

Hard times call for desperate measures!

Driven through the mines by great fans, this air took out every particle of moisture, and left coal dust so thick and dry that there were fatal explosions from the mere friction of loading-shovels. So it happened that these mines were killing several times as many men as other mines throughout the country.

Dated you say? 

"Inadequate ventilation, uncontrolled methane gas and excessive coal dust were major factors in the Upper Big Branch explosion" in West Virginia in 2010.  Twenty-nine workers died. May they rest in peace . . .

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

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The Story of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry - France, April 1915-November 1918 ed Capt R.B. Ainsworth

Another war for the DLI.  I took
photo at El Alamein

The Story of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry - France, April 1915-November 1918 edited by Captain R.B. Ainsworth M.C.  (unfortunately Amazon U.S. shows edited by unknown even though his name is in the book.)  This book is an account of the infantry in France and is fairly detailed. (US Edition)  (UK Edition) 

The party consisted of 24 men, including two bombing squads, and had as its object identification of the enemy on the immediate front. The night of the 6th June was chosen and the party went out as arranged. In No Man's Land they met a large enemy wiring party and their object was not attained. Three nights later, however, a German was captured, and again on the 12th the raiding party went out, this time with the object of killing Boches. They entered the enemy trench, and after doing considerable damage with bombs and rifles, returned without casualty.

It is written in a rather matter-of-fact style as you might imagine a battalion history would be.  The Durham Light Infantry is very well known and celebrated and participated at the Somme as well as in many other important battles.

The Battalion was holding the sector immediately on the right of the raiders, and its function was to draw the enemy's attention and fire by the exhibition of dummy figures and a dummy tank, which were later on view at the United Services Museum in Whitehall. 2nd Lieut. Leatherbarrow was in charge of these dummies, assisted by Sergeant P. Finn, who was awarded the Military Medal for his work. 

Other decorations earned during this period were Military Medals awarded to Corporal Nesbitt and Private Allison of X Company for digging out a man buried by shell fire, under very dangerous conditions.

We will remember them.
We will remember them.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers.

Within a Budding Grove - by Marcel Proust

US/UK Kindle Classic

1913 is the centenary of Swann's Way , the first book in French writer Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past.  I have featured Swann's Way here more than once, so feel it is time to move on to the second volume.

If you are ready to move up to the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, published in 1919 and translated by the excellent Scott Moncrieff - then you won't mind that it is not quite free.  They hook you on the first volume and then demand a derisory amount for the second!  ($0.99 US Edition)  (£0.77 UK Edition) 

As the book begins, Swann is no longer in favor:

"My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the housetops the name of everyone that he knew, however slightly, was an impossible vulgarian whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as— to use his own epithet— a 'pestilent' fellow."

As with any good book, there are many changes as you go along . . .  

If you have read the first book, you can hardly need urging to pick up the second - but with so many demands on our times, there are books that go unopened.  As you can buy this one with just a click, let me call it to your attention.

But whatever you do, don't reach for the version by "Prouts!" Amazing that Amazon would allow that howler on both the UK & US site.  It doesn't even credit the editor and translator, Scott Moncrieff - which is of course the only English translation out of copyright.  I won't give the link to make it easy to get by mistake - but it is easily found if you want a laugh.

If you are looking for the latest translation of this second volume, which is not free of course, the title is now In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.  A word of caution, this volume received the harshest reviews of the six newly translated volumes published with the Penguin imprint.  However, that is not to say these new translations are not good, just that this one is not the pick of the litter.

Thank you to my faithful readers for making this blog among the top 100 blogs on Amazon for many months now! It remains the only blog on classic literature for the Kindle.  Like the books presented here, my readers are very select.  Thank you!

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers.

Real Soldiers of Fortune - by Richard Harding Davis

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

It is always interesting me to read something like this:

"Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was an American author of romantic novels and short stories and the best known war correspondent of his generation. Davis was one of the most famous and idolized men of his time."

I never heard of him and I have read a lot of military history . . . well, better late than never!

This book is Real Soldiers of Fortune. (US Edition)  (UK Edition)   It profiles six men:

AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in this book were men who are no longer living, men who, to the United States, are strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly because in what they attempted they failed.

Well they are not all obscure - we all know William Churchill.  On Churchill:

. . .there are few young men—and he is a very young man—who have met more varying fortunes, and none who has more frequently bent them to his own advancement. To him it has been indifferent whether, at the moment, the fortune seemed good or evil, in the end always it was good.

This writer died in 1916 not dreaming that whatever he imagined for Churchill, it was not enough. 

This is amusing:

Now, one can step into a brass bed at Forty-second Street and in four days at the Coast get into another brass bed, and in twelve more be spinning down the Bund of Yokohama in a rickshaw. People go to Japan for the winter months as they used to go to Cairo. 

But in 1885 it was no such light undertaking, certainly not for a young man who had been brought up in the quiet atmosphere of an inland town, where generations of his family and other families had lived and intermarried, content with their surroundings.

Ahh for the days of brass beds . . .

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers.