In the fall of 2009, Taliban insurgents ambushed a patrol of Afghan soldiers and Marine advisors in a mountain village called Ganjigal. Firing from entrenched positions, the enemy was positioned to wipe out one hundred men who were pinned down and were repeatedly refused artillery support. Ordered to remain behind with the vehicles, twenty-one year-old Marine corporal Dakota Meyer disobeyed orders and attacked to rescue his comrades.
With a brave driver at the wheel, Meyer stood in the gun turret exposed to withering fire, rallying Afghan troops to follow. Over the course of the five hours, he charged into the valley time and again. Employing a variety of machine guns, rifles, grenade launchers, and even a rock, Meyer repeatedly repulsed enemy attackers, carried wounded Afghan soldiers to safety, and provided cover for dozens of others to escape—supreme acts of valor and determination. In the end, Meyer and four stalwart comrades—an Army captain, an Afghan sergeant major, and two Marines—cleared the battlefield and came to grips with a tragedy they knew could have been avoided. For his actions on that day, Meyer became the first living Marine in three decades to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
Investigations ensued, even as he was pitched back into battle alongside U.S. Army soldiers who embraced him as a fellow grunt. When it was over, he returned to the States to confront living with the loss of his closest friends. This is a tale of American values and upbringing, of stunning heroism, and of adjusting to loss and to civilian life.
We see it all through Meyer’s eyes, bullet by bullet, with raw honesty in telling of both the errors that resulted in tragedy and the resolve of American soldiers, U.S.Marines, and Afghan soldiers who’d been abandoned and faced certain death.
Meticulously researched and thrillingly told, with nonstop pace and vivid detail, Into the Fire is the true story of a modern American hero.
The year is 2135, and the international program to seed the galaxy with human colonies has stalled as greedy, immoral powerbrokers park their starships in Earth’s orbit and begin to convert them into space condos. Ellen Starke’s head, rescued from the fiery crash that killed her mother, struggles to regrow a new body in time to restore her dead mother’s financial empire. And Pre-Singularity AIs conspire to join the human race just as human clones, such as Mary Skarland and her sisters, want nothing more than to leave it.
Welcome to , the sequel to Marusek’s stunning debut novel, , which called “ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny.”
It's been almost a year since October 'Toby' Daye averted a war, gave up a county, and suffered personal losses that have left her wishing for a good day's sleep. She's tried to focus on her responsibilities — training Quentin, upholding her position as Sylvester's knight, and paying the bills — but she can't help feeling like her world is crumbling around her, and her increasingly reckless behavior is beginning to worry even her staunchest supporters.
To make matters worse, Toby's just been asked to find another missing child... only this time it's the changeling daughter of her fellow knight, Etienne, who didn't even know he was a father until the girl went missing. Her name is Chelsea. She's a teleporter, like her father. She's also the kind of changeling the old stories warn about, the ones with all the strength and none of the control. She's opening doors that were never meant to be opened, releasing dangers that were sealed away centuries before — and there's a good chance she could destroy Faerie if she isn't stopped.
Now Toby must find Chelsea before time runs out, racing against an unknown deadline and through unknown worlds as she and her allies try to avert disaster. But danger is also stirring in the Court of Cats, and Tybalt may need Toby's help with the biggest challenge he's ever faced.
Toby thought the last year was bad. She has no idea.
Genny's life has never been busier: the summer solstice is approaching, magic is going haywire, Spellcrackers.com is under inexperienced new management, and London is hosting this year's Carnival Fantastique. Then a unicorn is found horribly mutilated in Regent's Park, garden fairies start dying out of season, and an eminent wildlife activist and her young son are snatched from a Conservation Conference. Searching for answers takes Genny and her friends, Tavish the kelpie and the super-sexy vampire Malik al-Khan, deep into magical London to the decadent and dangerous Forum Mirabilis, the secret, bloody heart of the Carnival Fantastique. And it's not long before Genny and her friends are under attack from a millennium-old adversary as they fight to save both the victims and themselves ...
High up on the trapeze platform, the circus spotlights trained upon them, stood three blindfolded men clad in sparkling sequinned leotards. As the music died away, the men pulled hoods over their heads and began their intricate, faultless trapeze work. Small wonder the three men were known as “The Blind Eagles”. Bruno, Vladimir and Yoffe Wildermann — refugee brothers from East Germany — the high-spot of Tesco Wrinfield’s famous travelling circus. And in the audience as the two members of the CIA gazed up at the swinging acrobats the same thought occurred to them both — could Bruno be the man to help them?
Bruno is persuaded to return to his old country to penetrate the fortified castle of Lubylan, where the secret to a deadly scientific formula is kept. As cover to Bruno’s activities the circus travels on an East European tour — but before the circus has even moved the troupe has other members… From the moment the amazing Blind Eagles make their first appearance to the story’s climax within the fortress of Lubylan the action never flags. Here is Alistair MacLean at the top of his form in one of the most exciting stories he has ever written.
In this brilliant exploration of the post-9/11 world, leading Lebanese novelist and intellectual Amin Maalouf sets out to understand how we have arrived at such disorder. He explores three different but related aspects of disorder: intellectual (manifested in an unleashing of statements on identity that allow no possibility of peaceful co-existence or debate), economic and financial (that is exhausting the earth’s resources), and climatic (the result of turning a blind eye to the consequences of rampant industrialization). Instead of seeing the current disorder of the post-9/11 world as ‘a clash of civilisations’ Maalouf sees it as the ‘exhaustion of two civilisations’, a period in which humanity has reached its threshold of ‘moral incompetence’. Islam and the West have theoretical coherence, he says, but in practice each betrays its true ideals: the West is unfaithful to its own enlightenment values, which has discredited it in the eyes of the people to whom it has introduced democracy by force; while Islam finds itself condemned to a headlong rush into radicalism. These symmetrical disorders are only some of the elements in a global disorder that requires humanity as a whole to take responsibility for its future and face up to the urgent tasks such as climate change and the global financial crisis that threaten us all.
Here Come the Black Helicopters!
Stealthily advancing, the globalists and socialists at the United Nations, and in the United States itself, are trying to dilute our national sovereignty, undermine our democratic values, and mandate massive transfers of our wealth and technology to third world countries. They want to create a “global governance” where binding and critical decisions are made by the UN and international commissions, instead of by our elected officials.
They want to make us citizens of the world, and it means the end of annoying democratic institutions. Economic prosperity will be punished. All countries will be equal, rich and poor, large and tiny, free and enslaved. The Lilliputians will rule the giants.
The globalists dismiss democracy as obsolete and surrender us to rule by civil service experts: bureaucrats who are elected by nobody and accountable to no one. They want Congress to ratify a series of treaties and global initiatives that will give them control of the Internet, the seas, our carbon emission policies, our welfare system, and even outer space. They will hobble our ability to go to war and send our wealth to third world dictatorships.
They’ll attack anyone who tries to stop them.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 2012, Hillary Clinton mocked those fighting for American sovereignty as “the black helicopter crowd,” belittling those who value freedom and US sovereignty. Ironically, Clinton’s sarcastic putdown comes strikingly close to the truth.
They call it “global governance.” We call it the end of freedom. The homogenization of America. The day when the virtual black helicopters land.
So, watch out, the black helicopters are metaphorically on the way.
Iraq, 2004. Lawlessness is spreading throughout the country and looters have plundered the museums and historical sites. Mina Osman, a young American archaeologist of Iraqi descent, is fighting to preserve the country's antiquities. When she stumbles upon an ancient cuneiform tablet, it proves to be of unimaginable significance — its cryptic language holds a secret that will play a part in a series of earth-shattering events. Aided by ex-US Army Major Jack Hillcliff, Mina travels across the world to unlock the secrets of the 13th Tablet but at each step she is pursued by deadly enemies who will stop at nothing to obtain the tablet and its power for themselves.
http://youtu.be/Y-Qcl2mqsa8 — a book trailer.
The tale of an ambitious young girl struck down by an alien disease who straps on a spaceship and continues her archeological searches among the stars.
Selected by the New York Public Library for their 1993 Books for the Teen Age list of the year's best YA books.
"A perfect combination of SF, adventure, and romance...." Starred review in Kliatt.
Why did he leave her alive?
They find the girl in the master bedroom, the bodies of the family around her. She's holding a gun to her head. And she will only talk to Smoky Barrett.
Smoky is just starting to pick up the pieces of her own life. She knows what it's like to lose everyone you love. But her tragedy is nothing compared with this case. Because this isn't the first time it's happened. Sixteen-year-old Sarah Kingsley has lost her family before. Not once, but twice.
Someone out there wants her to stare death in the face - again and again . . .
"He doesn't kill for thrills, for sex, or even for power.It's far more twisted than that.... "
Cody McFadyen, acclaimed author of The Darker Side, The Face of Death," " and Shadow Man," "delivers this shocking new thriller that brings to light a psychopath unlike any we've ever seen--a killer who thrives in absolute darkness and doesn't derive pleasure from the kill. And only one woman has the ability to see him coming...even if it's already too late to stop her own murder.
For FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett, the wedding of one of their own was cause for celebration. Until a woman staggered down the aisle, incoherent, emaciated, head shaved, and wearing only a white nightgown. No one knows who she is or where she's come from--or why she's chosen to appear in a church filled with law enforcement agents. Then a fingerprint check determines that the woman has been missing for nearly eight years--that once she was someone's wife, someone's mother...and a cop. Imprisoning her in a dark cell, depriving her of any contact with the outside world, her enigmatic captor was a man she didn't know and who seldom spoke, who punished her only when she failed to follow his most basic instructions designed to keep her alive. Cold, businesslike, seemingly indifferent to his victims, he's a predator with an M.O. as terrifyingly inscrutable as any Smoky has ever encountered. As she fits together the pieces of what remains of his victim's fractured life, a chilling picture emerges of a killer every bit as calculating, masterful, and professional as Smoky and the team she leads--a professional psychopath who doesn't take murder personally and never makes a mistake. There's a reason he let one of his victims go free. And by the time Smoky pierces the darkness of his twisted mind, it may cost her more than she can bear to lose to escape. For a trap snapped closed the moment she took this case too much to heart.