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Nature's End

WarDay

by Whitley Strieber
and James Kunetka

Wolf of Shadows

by Whitley Strieber

Nature's End

by Whitley Strieber
and James Kunetka


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Synopsis

Warday and the Journey Onward
Published April 1984

October 28, 1988. Warday.
     It lasted only thirty-six minutes and when it was over, much of the earth remained untouched. But in those thirty-six minutes, a world had been destroyed.
     Seven million Americans died in the immediate blast. Millions more would die of radiation, famine, and disease during the next five years. Millions also lived, strung out across a country that knew it had been hit – but not why. Or where. Or how.
     In the days and months that followed, an America blacked out by the breakdown of its communications systems and wrestling with the demands of an unprecedented emergency struggled first for survival. Later it would seek answers – seek to find out how it happened, who had survived, what was left.
     Five years after Warday, the answers have yet to be found. America is still a strange place, filled with haunting relics of the past, constant reminders of what was lost. But survival is no longer in question. It is time to take stock.
     And so, five years after the missiles detonated, two survivors set forth on a trek across America. Determined to find out what has happened to the rest of the country, their will be a journey of discovery filled with pain and hope. From Texas to California, across the vast distances of the Great Plains, into the once-bold centers of commerce and power along the eastern coast, and through the small cities and rural hamlets of the South – amid pockets of resurgence and remnants of destruction, they will hear America speaking: remembering the past, willing the present, longing for a future.
     Warday: It takes you into a world you couldn’t imagine.

A work of fiction that reads like fact, Warday is the result of a skillful blending of the talents of Whitley Strieber (author of The Wolfen and The Hunger) and James W. Kunetka (author of City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Atomic Age, 19431945 and Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk). Texans by birth, best friends since childhood, and well-versed in the scientific and technological data underpinning the novel, they unite in one voice to depict an America in the aftermath of nuclear war. Though Warday is set in 1993, nothing in it is beyond the possible, technologically or politically. This is what gives the novel its terrifying truth.

A first-rate novel, as real as snapshots of tomorrow. And as scary. – New York Daily News
“Haunting...horrifying...engrossing...an all too believable look at what could be the future. – United Press International
Disturbingly plausible...its vision of post-nuclear chaos exceeds 'The Day After'. – Newsweek
Imaginative...entertaining reading. – Boston Herald
Frightening...controversial...a futuristic thriller. – Chicago Tribune
Extraordinary...a book that conceivably could make a difference. You owe it to yourself to read it. – Cosmopolitan

Warday
© 1984 Wilson & Neff, Inc. and James Kunetka
Synopsis courtesy of Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Jacket design by Robert Reed, Jacket typography by Andrew M. Newman, Front Jacket photograph by Gary Gladstone, The Image Bank.


Synopsis

Wolf of Shadows
Published 1985

Awards:
· Outstanding Children's Book of the Year by the American Library Association,
· 1986 Olive Branch Award as the outstanding book of the year for young people on the subject of world peace,
· Outstanding Science Book for Children by the National Science Teacher's Assoc.

One quiet spring evening, the animals of the north woods see a great light mushroom up from the human territories. Most ignore it, but Wolf of Shadows, sitting alone on his hill, knows that something is terribly wrong. The next day ashen clouds block out the sun, and an icy black rain comes, washing away the smells of all living things. It gets colder, then colder still. Nuclear winter has begun.
     As sleet changes to snow in wolf country, a desperate human mother and her daughter appear and join Wolf of Shadows as he leads his pack south. This is the story of their journey – a dark odyssey through the desolate, frozen wasteland that was once the United States. Always near freezing and starvation, threatened by savage dog packs and marauding humans, the wolves and the two women soon come to depend on one another for survival. As their journey progresses, an unspoken buy deeply felt love grows between them. This alone sustains them in their search for a place where life can be reborn.
     Wolf of Shadows is more than a compelling tale of survival in the wild. It is a unique, passionately wrought vision – told, hauntingly, from the viewpoint of Wolf of Shadows himself – of the horror we may bring to every living creature on earth.

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Wolf of Shadows is...

…not just another book on the horrors of nuclear war. Though written for younger readers, I suspect that their elders are more in need of this jolt to the imagination. – Paul Warnke, Former Director, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Chief Negotiator for SALT II

…able to portray for children the horrors of nuclear war without damaging the spirit. It is the story's warmth which allows it to teach and reveal without instilling a depressing or terrifying fear. – Congressman Edward J. Markey, Author of the nuclear freeze resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives

…an extraordinary book of beauty and tears. Anyone who loves this opal planet that is our home should read it. – Jean Craighead George, Author of Newbery Medal winner Julie of the Wolves

...powerful. Like the wolves of his story who challenge a rival by staring it down, Whitley Strieber has chosen to address nuclear fears by facing them boldly. – The New York Times Book Review

…brilliantly told and terrifying. – Roger Caras, Author and wildlife expert

Wolf of Shadows
© 1985 Wilson & Neff, Inc.
Synopsis courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Hardcover jacket illustration by Marc Rosenthal.
Front and end piece map illustration by David Lindroth (hardcover edition only).


Synopsis

Nature's End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century
Published 21 April 1986

Imagine cities with blackened air, where men, women, and children gasp for breath. Imagine a countryside with almost no trees...a land where severe droughts, dust storms, and forest fires rage. Imagine an America of astonishing achievements – but so overpopulated and ravaged by its own excesses that it totters on the brink of the destiny predicted long ago in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
     This is the world that confronts us in Nature’s End – a world only a few years from now. With all the vivid detail, compassion, and compelling suspense of their New York Times bestseller, the highly acclaimed Warday, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka now bring us another riveting novel based on scientific fact. Where their earlier book depicted the grim reality of nuclear war, Nature’s End portrays, with the same powerful documentary style, a devastation even more likely to occur: total environmental collapse. It is a crisis that will endanger the entire globe - and demand all the creativity, strength, and courage of humankind.
     As Nature’s End opens, the horrifying proposals of Dr. Gupta Singh are gathering momentum. A frightening demagogue with a saintly Gandhi-like demeanor, Singh has dared to voice the unthinkable: the voluntary suicide of one third of the world’s people.
     Threatened by poisoned air, water, and food that no longer can support the too rapidly growing populace, nation after nation has joined the Depopulationist International. And now, as the United States stands on the edge of environmental disaster, terrified voters elect a Depopulationist majority in Congress.
     Time is running out; only a handful of Americans can stop Singh and expose the danger of his views before his Manifesto becomes the law of the land and millions die. Led by journalist John Sinclair, they find themselves on the run, speeding toward catastrophe, with their lives – and the lives of all humanity – hanging perilously in the balance.
     As Singh fights back, in one master stroke of psychological warfare after another, their hope lies in the coded data files of Sinclair’s dead son, Tom, and a mysterious clue: the secret of mankind’s future has something to do with children and a place called Magic.
     Here are the horrors – and the wonders – of a technology that is both destroying and advancing humanity. Here is a mystery, a quest, a thriller – an absorbing novel about a future that may someday be ours.

From the paperback:

The year is 2025. Immense numbers of people swarm the globe. In countless, astonishing ways, technology has triumphed – but at a staggering cost. Starvation is rampant. City dwellers gasp for breath under blackened skies. And tottering on the brink of environmental collapse, the world may be ending...
     It is a future that could well be ours. In their second shocking and fascinating portrait of America's possible destiny, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka have again written a breathless thriller, a book that gives us an important warning and ultimately a message of hope.

Nature’s End
© 1986 Wilson & Neff, Inc.
Synopsis courtesy of Warner Books, Inc.
Jacket Design by Jackie Merri Meyer. Jacket Photograph by Eric Meola, The Image Bank.