City Of Skies

Like David McCullough's "The Great Bridge, City in the Sky" is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.

ONE GIRL. A DEADLY QUEST. AN EPIC JOURNEY. Nora Hunt has just joined the deadly quest to discover an ancient legend: the nine worlds of the Vikings. Her post-apocalyptic dystopian world, Triangle of Peace, is the only home she's ever known. But at sixteen years old, the skilled young warrior joins an elite band of raiders called Jarls. Her mission? Merely to win the perilous battle for the artifacts that awaken the Viking realms and avoid falling in love with the charming boy who just happens to be her worst enemy-and she's not quite sure which task is more difficult. But when Nora learns the Norse gods bestowed upon her a mystical secret in the form of the tattoo on her back, the stakes are higher than ever to claim the great Viking Empires.

In recent years, Minneapolis has become one of America’s literary powerhouses. With over fifty poems and essays, Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology collects some of the most exciting work being done in, or about, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area, with narrative threads that stretch back not just to Scandinavia, but across the world. Edited by Frank Bures (The Geography of Madness), the writers included here have won, or been shortlisted for, the Newbery Award, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, the Caldecott Award, the National Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award, and many others.

When Seckry Sevenstars is forced out of his village by the greedy Endrin Corporation and relocated to the daunting metropolis of Skyfall City, he harbours resentment for the company and vows to get them back one day for taking away his home, his school and his friends. Fortunately, the marvels of the city do a good job in distracting Seckry from his anger and homesickness, and it isn't long before he's competing at Friction (the city's most popular multiplayer video game), slurping awe-inspiring multicoloured milkshakes, and getting butterflies on his first date. Then, when a mysterious email asks Seckry to break into the headquarters of the Endrin Corporation and steal a container full of worms for a hefty sum of money, his anger resurfaces, and he can't resist the revenge he promised himself. Alone at night, Seckry creeps through the sewers whilst wondering what experiments Endrin might be doing on the worms, and emerges into the silent complex. But the worms aren't the only thing that he finds. Staring at him through the darkness, with wide, innocent eyes, is something that makes Seckry's heart almost stop. A girl. She's shaking, petrified, and has no recollection of who she is or what she's doing there. Floodlights bleach the area and Seckry has no choice but to grab a hold of the girl and escape with her. Suddenly the question of what Endrin were doing with a few worms becomes the last thing on Seckry's mind. What were Endrin doing with a human?

In the mid-twenty-seventh century, humanity exists as two distinct civilizations separated by the vacuum of space. Content in their isolation, the Ozzaens, inheritors of the grand orbital city of Ansenar, virtually ignore their distant cousins on Earth. But things are about to change ... The mysterious Circularium Council has carefully manipulated events, bringing the long-estranged cultures into contact again. Their motives are unclear and there are those who fear the change and seek to undermine it for their own ends. Thrust into this volatile situation is young Sean Kenzie, the first Ozzaen ambassador, who discovers that he holds the key to a power much greater than he ever imagined. Sean quickly learns that political intrigue and diplomacy are dangerous and deadly games. Now, Sean must uncover the secret to his destiny, knowing that the fate of both civilizations rests in his hands. A skillful blend of rich detail and human emotion, The City of the Sky deftly portrays one man's ultimate battle between good and evil in an ever-changing world.

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen. In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens. Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.