BOOKS

Ollie wants to lead a Boy Scout troop. Wade wants to lead soldiers into combat. Dr. Snider just wants to go home and retire. The three men find themselves taking a group of reluctant teenagers on a campout in the wilds of Nagorno Karabakh, where the get hopelessly lost. They wander into the no-man’s-land between Armenia and Azerbaijan and find themselves caught up in a small war. To make things worse, the US has lost a nuclear warhead in the area and the Russians and Iranians want to find it as badly as the Americans do. The kids come upon it first and only the Baku Boy Scouts and their arch-rivals, the Math Genies, can avert a major international incident."

With the collapse of the government after the Second World War, Americans have learned to live without help or interference from police, lawyers and bureaucrats. In this simple and happy world lives an eleven-year-old boy who wants to be a scientist. He finds a plant that can produce uranium which he and his friends set about to put to good use. The plant mysteriously disappears without a trace until the young scientist and his friends discover a secret operation run by desperate men. The boys' discovery leads them to a murder and a kidnapping.

What will the little town of Vancouver, Washington, with no police, no court and no jail, do with a crime of this magnitude? Can they cope with the crisis this miraculous bush brings on? The missing item eventually turns up in the most unlikely of places, but in the end they discover that the real wonder isn't the plant.

A young scientist and his friends are introduced to the frightening array of alternate universes when he creates a device that can open a doorway between dimensions. He learns that very small events can change how the world operates in very powerful and terrifying ways. Lost in a wilderness of parallel worlds and on the verge of despair, he finally discovers the key to finding his way home.

When he finally makes it back, he vows to never leave the safety and comfort of his home universe again. He soon discovers, however, that the world of the human brain can be just as scary when he creates a machine that can read minds.

After peering into the private thoughts and deepest longings of his close friends, he decides to destroy his creation only to discover how badly he needs it to fight the most horrifying menace of all-the ghost of a dead evil genius alive in cyberspace.

LATEST FROM LLOYD SPARKS

This book is a unique work, a martial arts-based Korean health system. It is a book is about taking care of ourselves. The author, a Taekwondo grandmaster and acupuncturist, makes the argument that we are all connected, and we must take care of others as well as ourselves. There is no individual health that does not affect the health of everyone else. Conversely, there is no illness that does not affect us all, either. We cannot trust the government or private industry to guarantee health to everyone. Your health is your responsibility; it comes from within you. So does happiness. All happiness and health start with mental attitude. From that come right actions through the instruction of wise teachers which bloom into health-supporting habits that lead to happiness and fitness long into old age. The author’s recommended actions are very basic and very small. Little thoughts and actions matter.

With the collapse of the government after the Second World War, Americans have learned to live without help or interference from police, lawyers and bureaucrats. In this simple and happy world lives an eleven-year-old boy who wants to be a scientist. Unfortunately, he's grounded for taking his friends into outer space in his spaceship without asking first. Now there's nothing to do to escape boredom but make monsters. He starts with a strange fungus he finds at school.
Unfortunately his specimen becomes a little too hard to handle when it grows into a giant and learns to move. Before he can destroy it, the thing makes its escape into the neighbors' pond. Making a submarine to go after it doesn't quite work out, though, when the sub becomes a snack for a giant octopus.
No matter, for the scientist and his friends have more pressing concerns than a fungus monster and a giant octopus. By mixing frog DNA with a chicken egg they've accidentally created a dinosaur which threatens the entire county.

With the collapse of the government after the Second World War, Americans have learned to live without help or interference from police, lawyers and bureaucrats. It is a simple and happy time until rumors of a terrorist attack suddenly plunge the sleepy community of Vancouver Washington into a fight for survival. What do you do when there is no government to protect you? When the town rashly joins a hastily formed coalition to fight an enemy they do not fully understand, things go wrong in a hurry. A group of high school friends find that they must face this threat alone. But who is the real enemy? They must rely on each other and find in themselves the strength to manage and overcome. In the end they learn that their biggest enemy was inside them all along.

This is the story of the author’s excursion into the complex and contradictory world of the Bible smuggler in the 1970s. In it the author relates how he became involved through his church as a courier one summer and advanced to full time involvement in developing underground information and distribution networks. It is the chronicle of several trips into each of the then Iron Curtain countries in which the author reveals the diverse spectrum of personalities and forces that made up the Bible smugglers, Eastern European Christians and the unregistered churches in the Communist countries before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is an exciting, humorous, poignant and ultimately tragic account of a young man’s experience at a pivotal point in history and his own life.

This is the story of how a bizarre turn of events pulled the author away from a successful career in the brain sciences into the murky world of the defense contractor, a phenomenon unique to our time. The US military now employs more contractors than soldiers when it goes to war, paying international corporations astonishing amounts of money to hire back former service members. This book offers a unique glimpse from the inside into this complex world. The author takes the reader through the events that dropped him into his first job as a contractor at the Military Intelligence school at Ft. Huachuca in 2006. There, he trained military professionals in the art of extracting reliable information from human sources. The story offers insight into how the government has come to pour vast amounts of money into an expensive and largely unaccountable industry. It displays the schizophrenic nature of the system which is often staffed by the same individuals, sometimes in uniform and sometimes not. The reader is left to ponder whether our defense, our intelligence, and ultimately our security is better served by the Defense Department or the defense industry, and to what degree are the two actually the same.