1984

1984

George Orwell

SUMMARY: Winston Smith lives in a society where the government controls people's lives every second of the day. Alone in his small, one-room apartment, Winston dreams of a better life. Is freedom from this life of suffering possible? There must be something that the Party cannot control - something like love, perhaps?
After America

After America

John Birmingham

From Publishers Weekly
In this sequel to Without Warning, Birmingham delivers a stirring account of the events after "the Disappearance," tracking a group of survivors in New York, Seattle, Texas, Kansas City, Berlin, Salisbury, and London. Shortly before the Iraq War, a wave of unknown energy passes over most of North America, scouring humanity and triggering chaos. Now the wave is gone, and the survivors face the challenges of rebuilding their empty continents. In the Texas Administrative Division, an ex-general wages a war of ethnic cleansing against the new immigrants coming in search of opportunity; in New York, hoards of scavengers pick through the ruins of the city. Meanwhile, over a billion Muslims are left homeless after Israeli nukes make the Middle East uninhabitable, and they need somewhere to live. As American forces attempt to retake the East Coast, an inexperienced president finds his leadership tested. Though his dialogue often feels functional or formulaic, Birmingham's inspired speculation is ingenious and engrossing. Along with colorful if not entirely sympathetic characters and a wicked sense of the absurd, this should make excellent pool-side reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Now, three years later, a skeleton U.S. government headquartered in Seattle directs the reconstruction of an entire nation—and the battle for New York City has begun.
Pirates and foreign militias are swarming the East Coast, taking everything they can. The president comes to the Declared Security Zone of New York and barely survives the visit. The enemy—whoever they are—controls Manhattan’s concrete canyons and the abandoned flatlands of Long Island. The U.S. military, struggling with sketchy communications and a lack of supplies, is mired in a nightmare of urban combat.
Caught up in the violence is a Polish-born sergeant who watches the carnage through the eyes of an intellectual and with the heart of a warrior. Two smugglers, the highborn Lady Julianne Balwyn and her brawny partner Rhino, search for a treasure whose key lies inside an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. Thousands of miles away, a rogue general leads the secession of Texas and a brutal campaign against immigrants, while Miguel Pieraro, a Mexican-born rancher, fights back. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent is called into a violent shadow war against an enemy that has come after her and her family.
The president is a stranger to the military mindset, but now this mild-mannered city engineer from the Pacific Northwest needs to make a soldier’s choice. With New York clutched in the grip of thousands of heavily armed predators, is an all-out attack on the city the only way to save it?
From the geopolitics of post-American dominance to the fallout of Israel’s nuclear strike, After America provides a gripping, intelligent, and harrowing chronicle of a world in the maw of chaos—and lives lived in the dangerous dawn of a strange new future.
Deception Point

Deception Point

Dan Brown

EDITORIAL REVIEW: From the *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Da Vinci Code* comes an explosive, high-tech thriller that takes readers from the chilling depths of the Arctic Ocean to the treacherous heights of Washington power. When a new NASA satellite spots evidence of an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much-needed victory...a victory that has profound implications for U.S. space policy and the impending presidential election. With the Oval Office in the balance, the President dispatches White House Intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton to the Milne Ice Shelf to verify the authenticity of the find. Accompanied by a team of experts, including the charismatic academic Michael Tolland, Rachel uncovers the unthinkable: evidence of scientific trickery -- a bold deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy. But before Rachel can contact the President, she and Michael are attacked by a deadly team of assassins controlled by a mysterious power broker who will stop at nothing to hide the truth. Fleeing for their lives in an environment as desolate as it is lethal, their only hope for survival is to find out who is behind this masterful ploy. The truth, they will learn, is the most shocking deception of all. In *Deception Point,* bestselling author Dan Brown transports readers from the ultrasecret National Reconnaissance Office to the towering ice shelves of the Arctic Circle, and back again to the hallways of power inside the West Wing. Heralded for masterfully intermingling science, history, and politics in his critically acclaimed, blockbuster thrillers *Angels & Demons* and *The Da Vinci Code,* Brown has crafted a novel in which nothing is as it seems -- and behind every corner is a stunning surprise. *Deception Point* is pulse-pounding fiction at its best.