Books: Good, bad and mad

Amazon books has a new feature called Kindle Unlimited, which you can try free for a month. (Afterward, the cost is less than ten bucks a month. Cheap.) Basically, the service works a bit like a lending library: You can borrow up to ten books at a time and read them on your Kindle -- either the actual physical reading device (which I do not own) or the Kindle Cloud Reader or the Kindle Reading App, which stores the books on your home computer system temporarily.

At this point, the Sneaky Petes among us will shout "Aha!"

Once the text is (temporarily) placed on your system, you (if you are clever) may be able to convert your temp copies of the books from Kindle's native format to one of the more common formats. Once you turn a book into an epub or mobi or pdf, you can read it with STDU or Acrobat or similar software. And you can store your new copy on your hard drive forever.

Before you try that trick, you should be aware that converting books is a bit tricky and not for technophobes. Also, the practice is of dubious legality and morality and carries a notable risk of eternal damnation. For this reason, I strongly advise against the practice. In fact, I really must insist that you never do anything like this, because it would be wrong.

(Or so said Tricky Dick when he remembered that the mics were hot.)

Not every e-book has been earmarked for the Kindle Unlimited program. Most of the Unlimited books are self-published works written by authors who are not very well-known. Some of these authors are undiscovered talents who have really interesting things to say; others are just...undiscovered.

The Kindle Unlimited program also includes a decent number of "real" books by name authors, published by major publishers. Finding these works isn't always easy, but they do exist, in just about every field of inquiry.

Surprisingly, some of the very best JFK assassination books -- plus a whole lot of not-so-good ones -- are available via Kindle Unlimited. I recommend these titles:

1. John Newman's Oswald and the CIA. Not an easy read: Newman (a former Army intelligence analyst) once jokingly referred to his work as "Oswald, the File," because he scrutinizes every jot and tittle of the declassified documentation concerning LHO. If you read nothing else about the JFK case, read the epilogue appended to this edition: Newman basically solves the case and names the mastermind. (Longtime readers of this blog will know the name already.)

2. Destiny Betrayed and Reclaiming Parkland -- both by Jim DiEugenio. (Incidentally, he was not informed that his books would be part of the Unlimited program. I don't know how Amazon pays these authors.)

3. A Secret Order by H.P. Albarelli. This is a compilation of bizarre stories arising from various investigatory byways. Even people who know the case well will find lots of truly new information in this amazing work. Highly recommended. It's a wild ride, a fun read, yet grounded in serious research.

4. The Grassy Knoll Report. The best introductory volume I know, written by a friend to this blog.

5. Last Word, by Mark Lane. Lots of terrific stuff here.

6. JFK Has Been Shot, by one of the doctors who tried to save the President's life.

7. A Rose By Many Other Names. This book looks at the unfortunate Rose Cheramie, the woman who "called the shot" before the assassination. Albarelli also has much information about her.

8. From an Office Building With High-Powered Rifle. This one is about Joseph Milteer, a white supremacist who seemed to have advance knowledge of the assassination. His prophetic words were recorded beforehand by an FBI informant.

9. Barry Krusch's Impossible books.

All of the above are worthy of formal purchase. I would also recommend Douglas Horne's excellent JFK's War with the National Security State, which isn't on the Unlimited program, but which you can purchase for only a dollar.

If the Great Unpleasantness of 1963 is not your area of interest, I'm sure that you will still want to check out Kindle Unlimited. There's bound to be something relevant to your favored field of study, whatever that may be.

As noted above, many of the offerings are "amateur hour" books. These works tend to be decidedly odd.

An agonizingly high number of them are about "prepping" (or, as we used to call it, survivalism). There may be as many books about prepping as there are preppers.

Many self-published books are devoted to proclaiming this message: "Jesus never existed! Be an Atheist! NOW!! Do it NOW or I shall SMIRK at you! Smirk smirk smirk! SMIRRRRRRKKKK!!!"

Another popular category: Works by strippers and hookers.

You will find a disturbingly large number of books which one might label "neo-fascist" or "Hitler apologist" or "white supremacist." Perhaps the funniest example of this genre is this work by a man named Frank DeSilva. (Also see here.) In truth, I have not actually read his books, but the covers reveal a lot about the author. He likes hunky dudes and phallic imagery. 

Almost needless to say, one may find many books devoted to the proposition that Barack Obama is the single worstest human being ever, because he's a Muslim. Or a Commie. Or a Muslim commie.

Did you know that Larry Sinclair (the screwy guy who claims to have had sex with Obama) has written a book? I haven't read it yet, but I'm sure that it is very credible. No doubt it will change history.

Here are a few more hilarious Obama-related titles:

OBAMA INVENTED EBOLA: The Illuminati Truth 100%, by Mr. Illuminati the Tinfoil-Hat-Wearer -- and yes, that is the name he gives. Four pages long, yet Amazon still calls this one a "book." (By the way, Ebola was discovered in the 1970s.)

Saul Alinsky: The Evil Genius Behind Obama, by Jerome Corsi. This is just one of several books devoted to exposing the monstrous menace of Alinskiism. (Example.)

OBAMA WAS BRED TO BE A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: AND, IRONICALLY, SO WAS I - WE HAVE THE SAME FATHER, A GERMAN STASI GENERAL, by Rick A. Hyatt. Perhaps the best title ever. Remember: You must always spell the name of this book in all caps. I would love to see the author give a talk on CSPAN.

Obama: The Worst President Ever!

Barack Obama, Prophecy, and the Destruction of the United States, by Bob Thiel, PhD.

My absolute favorite offering in this category must be Me and My Friend President Obama: Concise memos of my cooperations with The White House and CIA all around the hell, by Peiman Ghasemi. His bio is certainly quotable (if not entirely credible):

My life is full of espionage and political memories. When I started my political activities and when I started to fight for freedom of people, I was only 14, one of the teenager Iranian boys. I got tortured extremely hard. Today (February 15) I’m in Turkey and I decided to write a book, a concise part about my cooperation with The White House and The Central Intelligence Agency and many years of cooperation with Human Rights Watch (HRW) and IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies); a few political leaders of England, France, agents of NSA (The National Security Agency, who didn’t let me to submit any top secret information, before.) and CIA agents and Mossad and Shin Bet (Shabak) and USSS (The United States Secret Service) and Microsoft communicated with me about what am I started to write now? All around the hell, staying in Russia where your bones would sense it’s very cold weather, inside of it’s deep underground city where you ask your self “How is it possible for some satellites with their warheads to track me here?”. During travel to Philippines with it’s sexy girls inside of the bars and clubs...

It goes on and on like that. It's great. Downright poetic. Read it out loud, the way you'd read Howl or The City of Dreadful Night.

(Those two works are best recited while very drunk, as you stand on a hotel balcony at two in the morning, with your voice rising and rising until the hooker and her client in the room below scream at you to shut the fuck up. Try it!)

Oddly, Peiman's book has no text whatsoever. It's actually a haunting collection of photos, many of which seem to depict the entrances to underground military installations located in deserts. The experience of "reading" this "book" is genuinely unnerving, for reasons that are a bit hard to describe. Remember the video in The Ring? Imagine a parapolitical version of that, in pdf form.

Ten minutes after you're done with the book, the phone will ring. Don't answer.

Perhaps this "book" represents a new means by which spooks pass along information to other field agents. Or perhaps the author is just wacky.

If you come across similarly noteworthy additions to the Kindle Unlimited library, let me know!