Books ?

Ken Forkish's book is good fr home bakers "Flour Water Salt Yeast"

Flynnboy,  sorry you were not happy with Bread - it is my favorite book.  I suggest you go through it again, try  Baguettes de Tradition, and you will get a real appreciation of how little kneading is required to produce a well developed dough.  I use his recipes all the time, even when I am not using a machine. 

If you mix by hand only, Hamelman's machine approach should not be much of an obstacle.  His doughs typically require very limited gluten developement during the initial mixing and are eminently suitable for hand mixing.  All the other topics you mention he covers in great detail and probably better than anyone else.

At the risk of stating the obvious, have you checked to see what your local library has? It has the advantage of allowing you to bake from a book before you buy. That is what I did before I bought the Bread Bakers Apprentice.

Especially if you are a beginning baker, you might consider this:  you have a choice between a recipe book (sometimes called a bread book or a bread cookbook) which teaches some techniques or a text book which is written by an expert baker who uses it for a class in baking at a school.  (The Bread Baker's Apprentice is an excellent bread cookbook, but it is not a text book.) Text books take you from the ground up, teaching you of baking slowly and steadily, at your pace.  I recommend that beginners start learning from a text, not a collection of recipes with a smattering of techniques included in it.  I've yet to see such a book which is organized in a way which makes much sense.  Such books are much better for people who've already got some experience.

I regularly recommend that a beginner compare the Hamelman book to DiMuzio's Bread Baking.  Both are texts, but the DiMuzio's is, I think, better for most.  I agree that you should find the DiMuzio in the library if possible.  It's a lot less daunting than the Hamelman, though, as you can notice from the previous comments above, some really like it.  Because I've been baking for 40 years, I think Hamelman is a marvelous resource.  When I was just starting out I would have dropped the course because it was too much too soon.

By the way, the most bread books, including the DiMuzio, are available used at Powell's books or Alibris online.  The DiMuzio is usually around $20.