Gone & Michael Bennett

GONE & MICHAEL BENNETT                                                                  JAMES PATTERSON
Posted: Oct. 22, 2013

Gone by James Patterson A crime lord has declared war on America. Only Detective Michael Bennett knows why.

Manuel Perrine doesn't fear anyone or anything. A charismatic and ruthless leader, Perrine slaughters rivals as effortlessly as he wears his trademark white linen suit. Detective Michael Bennett once managed to put Perrine behind bars, the only official in the US ever to accomplish that. But now Perrine is out, and he has sworn to find and kill Bennett and everyone dear to him.

Detective Bennett, along with his ten adopted children, their nanny, and his grandfather, are hidden safely on a rural California farm, with guards courtesy of the FBI's witness protection program. Perrine begins to embark on an escalating series of assassinations across the country, killings whose brazenness and audacity bring into question the possibility of safety and law in the US. The FBI has no choice but to ask Detective Bennett to risk it all in Perrine's war on America.

With explosive action and fierce villainy that rivals James Bond movies at their best, GONE is the next astounding novel by James Patterson.


HUBBY'S REVIEW:

This book picks up where the last Bennett book ended. He along with his family is in protective custody and Manuel Perrine is out looking for him. But before he even starts looking for him he starts going after all the people who would not help him when he was in jail and the other drug lords who took over his areas .Needless to say it is non-stop action and on top of all of that Bennett is dealing with being at a place that he does not like. It is to quiet he is missing New York. Throughout this story you are hoping that they finally get this guy, you are not rooting for the bad guy in this book. Well written and worth the wait.

FIRE AND LIGHT: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World

FIRE AND LIGHT                                         JAMES MAC GREGOR BURNS               


Fire and Light by James MacGregor Burns "With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989

“James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is.” --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer
Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment

In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles.

Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.


HUBBY'S REVIEW:

This is a book about the Enlightenment movement and the effect it has had on three countries. England, France and United States. There is a lot of information in this book. It starts before the revolution and goes through to 1850. Right before our civil war (10 years). First let me say it difficult to put all of what he talked about into a review. But I will say that at each moment in our young nation beginnings we had the men who saw the need for more. For the Bill of Rights, the checks and balances of each branch of government. The willingness to listen and to compromise on different issues. To have men that we don’t even mention Samauel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock, Monroe, Madison, Hamilton along with many others who fought for states right but also that a government does not over power the people. Yet they thought that there should be free education along with many other things. The big thing he talks about is slavery and how England did away with it without having a war. That would have been nice. There is a lot of information and a lot of history which is great.

A DARKNESS DESCENDING (SANDRO CELLINI #4)

A DARKNESS DESCENDING (SANDRO CELLINI #4)      CHRISTOBEL KENT
Posted: Oct. 22, 2013

A Darkness Descending by Christobel Kent When Silvano Niccolo, the driven, charismatic leader of a Florentine political movement, collapses at a rally, his young party immediately comes under threat. And when it emerges that his long time partner, Flavia, has disappeared, leaving behind not only a devastated husband but their newborn son, the political becomes dangerously personal - and Sandro Cellini is drafted in to investigate. The trail leads to a tired sea-side town and a modest hotel, where Flavia chose to end her life. But Cellini isn't satisfied - why would one so young and with so much to live for, walk away from all she loves? As he digs into Flavia's secret world, however, Sandro uncovers the hidden life of a woman consumed with private passions and a deadly, dark obsession. And as the private and public realms intersect, he cannot forget that life in modern Italy has a perilous edge - fuelled as much by rage as desire.

HUBBY'S REVIEW:

This story is set in Italy, and it starts out with a mother killing herself. Two private detectives get together to work the case trying to figure out why a new mother would do such a thing. There are many underlining stories with this one. The father of the child is a politician, the mother in law never liked her daughter in law. Not good enough for her son. The wife of one of the detectives was dealing with the after affects from cancer. The other detective thinking it could be postpartum and still thinking maybe the father did it not knowing why? I thought with all of this going on that it would take away from the story but it did not. It added to it and then it turned on me at the end for a twist that I did not see coming. A very good mystery in who done it?

KING OF RAGS

KING OF RAGS                                          ERIC BRONSON
Posted: Oct. 22, 2013

King of Rags by Eric Bronson When music publisher John Stark first heard Scott Joplin play his piano, he knew that ragtime was the music of hope for a new America. "If you are alive to impulse, you felt the ground wave under your feet, and you dropped into sublime reverie," he wrote in 1904. But neither Stark nor anyone else knew that Joplin would never be content with popularity and fame.

Inspired by Booker T. Washington and the Dahomeyan defeat in West Africa, Joplin committed himself to racial justice fifty years before his time. But due to this earnest pursuit, he was later ignored by the masses for writing political music, and shunned by a new generation of artists for championing a life in rags.

In King of Rags, Eric Bronson shines a lyrical light on the tragic life of Scott Joplin and his fellow ragtime musicians throughout their frantic transformation of the seedy and segregated underbelly of comedians, conmen and prostitutes who called America’s most vibrant cities home.


HUBBY'S REVIEW:

I really enjoyed this story about Scott Joplin. A man who for the most part is forgotten in most areas of music. When the movie the Sting came out that music was his. That music being rag time. But like many musicians he was trained in classical music but came to make money writing ragtime. His lifelong dream was to have a musical on Broadway but that was not to be. It also lead him to an early grave and to end up giving music away for nothing. This is his story the people are real maybe the conversations might not have been exactly but you get the feel of the story. Of the musician trying to make his own way and his own music. He died so young still wanting to have a musical done that it was hard for him to give up until he died. A fantastic story about a forgotten man.

Veronica Blade Interview Here On Friday @ 7:00 pm pst

              Veronica Blade Here on Friday
                     @ 7:00 p.m. pst

                                             all on sal now

Single-handed

Single Girls: Book one

By Veronica Blade




Description:

Alex single-handedly takes down a bully. A safer school has its perks, but what else did the years of martial arts training get her? Not a prom date, that’s for sure. With only a few weeks left before the big day, can she stop the tough act long enough for the boy of her dreams to see she’s still just a
girl?



Singled Out

Single Girls: Book two

By Veronica Blade


Description:


Brittany’s short-lived fling with the insanely hot Wyatt left her seething, despite still liking him. Since he barely glances her way anymore, going to prom alone seems far better than going with some loser. But Brittany’s well-intentioned friends haven’t given up on Wyatt, and their matchmaking is getting downright awkward.




Single-minded

Single Girls: Book three

By Veronica Blade


Description:

Laynie’s been trying for years to squash her crush on her brother’s best friend, Josh — who treats her like a little sister. Then things take a turn to the delicious side when Josh gets her in a lip-lock over the kitchen counter. Now she can’t even think about going to prom with anyone else. But hoping for love from the king of fast-and-loose hookups will only lead to heartbreak. Or will it?




My Wolf’s Bane
Veronica Blade:
Shapes of Autumn, Book One

Different species. Mortal enemies.
It’ll never work, but they’ll die trying.

Autumn Rossi thought she was a normal teenager. Suddenly, she can outrun the creatures of the forest, making her wonder if she’s even human.
When the new guy at school, Zack de Luca, witnesses a questionable scene, he unfairly pins her as stuck-up. He acts like he hates her, yet he keeps bailing her out of trouble. Not only is Zack insufferable and irresistible, he seems to sniff her anytime he gets close.
As passion flares between them, Autumn isn’t sure which is more dangerous: her psycho ex-boyfriend, or falling for Zack — who’s risking his life just by being near her.

EXCERPT:

The smell of unwashed wolf closed in on me, fur tickling my skin and fetid breath in my face. I trembled, hot tears burning my eyes. The wolf snarled and I scrambled back as he leapt toward me.
“Autumn. Autumn, wake up.” Zack pulled me off the pillow by my shoulders.
I lifted my head and rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe away the mental fuzz. But I was aware enough to notice my comforter wasn’t anywhere near us, certainly not separating me from him. I must have kicked it off during my nightmare.
“Are you okay?” Zack was sitting directly in front of me, his thighs straddling mine, heat from his bare skin radiating through me.
I nodded.
He exhaled in relief and leaned back to sit on his heels. “Heard you scream and I ran up here. Been calling your name over and over, but you wouldn’t wake up. Scared me for a minute there.”
I’d been having that same dream where I was being chased. “I was running from wolves.”
He brushed a finger down my cheek. “It was just a dream.”
“More like a nightmare,” I whispered, my gaze locking onto his. He wore nothing but a pair of boxers. As my ragged breath slowed, I realized the only other thing between us was my threadbare tank top and skimpy panties.
“Autumn.” His breathing quickened and he growled so low it sounded like a purr. Then he tilted my face to meet his and drew closer until I felt his breath on my skin. “You’re too beautiful.”

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