Tales of a Book Addict

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.

Two books this week, both from Paperbackswap:

Japan, 1945: Two U.S. bombers take off with atomic bombs. Only one gets through.

The Pacific, 1993: A Japanese cargo ship bound for the United States is instantly, thunderously vaporized, taking with it a Norwegian vessel. Japanese fanatics have developed a chilling plan to devastate and destroy the Western powers. From the ocean depths to the discovery of cache of lost Nazi loot, Dirk Pitt is untangling a savage conspiracy and igniting a daring counterattack. While Washington bureaucrats scramble, a brutal industrialist commands his blackmail scheme from a secret island control center. And Dirk Pitt, the dauntless hero of Sahara and Inca Gold, is taking on death-dealing robots and a human-hunting descendant of samurai warriors. Pitt alone controls the West’s secret ace in the hole: a tidal wave of destruction waiting to be triggered on the ocean floor!

There have been many words used to describe the Kennedy boys … handsome, aggressive, charismatic, charming, volatile, red-blooded, and sexy. This book investigates the latter descriptions, an in-depth probe into the more sensual aspects of the Kennedy mystique.

Here are Jack and Bob and Ted and all the girls you’ve ever heard whispered or gossiped about, a few you never heard of, and, too, those gals who somehow fell onto the front pages … Judy and Marilyn and Lee and Angie and Kim and Rita and Page and Jayne and Janet and Mary and Candy and Mariella and Rhonda and Amanda and Joan and Maria and more girls than anyone would have thought possible…

Well, I made it all of 2 days into the new year before I purchased 2 new books. Oops. Here’s what I bought:

  
September 1861: All is not as it seems. With these cryptic words, a shocking secret passed down from president to president comes to rest in the hands of Abraham Lincoln. And as the first bloody clashes of the Civil War unfold, Lincoln alone must decide how best to use this volatile knowledge: save thousands of American lives, or keep the young nation from being torn apart forever?

The present: In Utah, the fabled remains of Mormon pioneers whose nineteenth-century expedition across the desert met with a murderous end have been uncovered. In Washington, D.C., the official investigation of an international entrepreneur, an elder in the Mormon church, has sparked a political battle between the White House and a powerful United States senator. In Denmark, a Justice Department agent, missing in action, has fallen into the hands of a dangerous zealot—a man driven by divine visions to make a prophet’s words reality. And in a matter of a few short hours, Cotton Malone has gone from quietly selling books at his shop in Denmark to dodging bullets in a high-speed boat chase.

All it takes is a phone call from his former boss in Washington, and suddenly the ex-agent is racing to rescue an informant carrying critical intelligence. It’s just the kind of perilous business that Malone has been trying to leave behind, ever since he retired from the Justice Department. But once he draws enemy blood, Malone is plunged into a deadly conflict—a constitutional war secretly set in motion more than two hundred years ago by America’s Founding Fathers.

From the streets of Copenhagen to the catacombs of Salzburg to the rugged mountains of Utah, the grim specter of the Civil War looms as a dangerous conspiracy gathers power. Malone risks life, liberty, and his greatest love in a race for the truth about Abraham Lincoln—while the fate of the United States of America hangs in the balance.

A schoolgirl found it on a nature hike. A severed human foot wearing pink nail polish. A gruesome but invaluable clue that leads forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman down a much darker trail—to a dangerous psychopath whose powers of persuasion seem to have no end. Only by teaming up with sheriff’s detective Kendall Stark can Birdy hope to even the odds in a deadly game. It’s a fateful decision the killer wants them to make. And it’s the only way Birdy and Kendall can find their way to a murderer who’s ready to kill again…