Two books this week, both from Paperbackswap (when will I learn to stay off that site?!):
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.
Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.
When Dirk Pitt intercepts a rogue blimp on a deadly course, authorities find four dead men aboard. None of them ,however, is the wealthy American financier who set out aboard the antique airship on an ocean treasure hunt in the Bermuda Triangle. He and his crew have disappeared, and the dead men are discovered to be Soviet cosmonauts. Meanwhile, the President of the United States is informed that a covert group of U.S. industrialists successfully placed a secret colony on the moon nearly three decades previously. Now, a Soviet mission is poised to land on the moon, and what they find there may lead to nuclear war. Threatened in space, the Russians are about to strike a savage blow in Cuba. From the cold ocean depths to a Cuban torture chamber to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Pitt is racing to defuse an international conspiracy that threatens to shatter the earth.
Tales of a Book Addict 