Books with author Benjamin M.

It's time for Revenge. Benjamin Martin, author of the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist Samurai Awakening, returns with another masterpiece of young adult fiction and the next installment in his riveting shapeshifter saga.American teenager David Matthews has more to deal with than the average exchange student living in Japan—a lot more. In Samurai Awakening, David woke one morning to discover that he'd been empowered and possessed by the tiger god Kou. Now a Jitsugen Samurai in Revenge of the Akuma Clan and able to take on Kou's form, David must use his new abilities to protect Japan from the terrifying evil creeping across the land—and waiting for him to fail.As his relationships, especially with Rie his host sister, grow uncertain, he must forge deeper connections with Kou, the tiger god that resides with him, and form new alliances if he hopes to hold back the return of Japan's ancient enemies. It is up to David to stop the powerful and vengeful Akuma Clan—and time is running out.

'The emperor's mistress had been murdered, and the world had been taken hold of and turned upon its head' Prague, 1599. Christian Stern, a young doctor, has just arrived in the city. On his first evening, he finds a young woman's body half-buried in the snow. The dead woman is none other than the emperor's mistress, and there's no shortage of suspects. Stern is employed by the emperor himself to investigate the murder. In the search to find the culprit, Stern finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of the emperor's court - unspoken affairs, letters written in code, and bitter rivalries. But there's no turning back now...

A story of hope, love, and unspeakable death in a disappearing Brazilian rainforest. A team of dogged conservationists tries to save a beautiful monkey species, the golden lion tamarin, from certain extinction by reinforcing their numbers with tamarins born in zoos. Will these immigrants learn to find enough to eat, find secure places to sleep, avoid predators, and survive attacks by wild tamarins? Will they find mates and make babies? The technique, known as reintroduction, is new, and the conservationists struggle to find the best method. Can they train the tamarins in zoos to meet the challenges of the wild? Once the monkeys are released in the forest, should the people give them food, shoo away predators, rescue them if they get lost, and treat them if they are injured? Or should they be hands-off, letting the monkeys fend for themselves and become wild as quickly as possible? Beck describes the reintroduction of the first 13 tamarins, capturing their fierce determination to survive, their loves and conflicts, their nurturant families, adorable babies, hidden language, sometimes hilarious attempts to solve the problems of adapting, and the agonizing deaths of those who don't make it. He describes the power and beauty of the rainforest, and the loves, loyalties, conflicts, and sometimes hilarious bumbling by their human caretakers. Challenging their better-known bosses, two women, a zookeeper and a Brazilian field assistant, discover the right way to reintroduce the monkeys. But a well-known Rio citizen almost destroys the program in a callous act of vanity. The story is vivid and authentic; Beck was there and has studied animal thinking and monkey and ape conservation for more than 40 years.

Our greatest instrument in pursuit of our pleasure and relief of our pain, our greatest monument to ourselves and in our service, will be our development of a type of AI. AI would represent the pinnacle of our technology. It is science as art; a technology so unique and powerful that it could have only been created by Gods.It is the ultimate conceit. The fruition of our belief that our existence is special and that our lives have purpose, chief among them the creation of beings, sentient or not, who imitate their creators to the extent that anyone to whom our existence is alien could not distinguish creator from created, maker from made, and therefore, they could not distinguish original intelligence from artificial intelligence. Now there is only intelligence.Bodies. Any idiot can make a body. Hell, the first man and woman who made a body did so without even realizing that they were making one. How hard is that? Any idiot can destroy a body. Just squeeze the trigger, push the button, plant the bomb, close the switch, throw death, frag out, swing the blade, loose the arrow, give the command, turn a blind eye. Bury, honor and remember the dead. Comfort the dying. One last request, “Tell my family I love them.” Will do. Relax. Let nature do the rest. God and Heaven await you. Thanks for trying.Muscle memory. Training until mind and body are one. Repetition ad infinitum until I become bored of it and believe I no longer need it only to pay the price of my own complacency. I hope that price isn’t too high so I can learn from my mistake. A perishable skill if not practiced beyond perfection. Perfection never possible so practiced to numbness. I no longer think about it but react to it. Process becomes reason. Anticipate. Break his decision cycle. Get inside of his decision loop. Now he reacts to my movement. My move. His move. My feint. His move. My countermove. His death. My life.Bodies we destroy all the time and for every one destroyed it seems two more are born. If I tire of this game and want to exit the loop I can destroy all who gave birth to him or I can convince him to play another game, this game of ours, and accept him as a player in this world. To capture the mind would transform the science of war into the art of war. Then, at that point, they no longer have the motivation or will to fight except on behalf of those things we think are worth fighting for. Players in a game. Pieces on a board. Game over.What game shall you play?

In this acclaimed novel by the author of the award-winning, bestselling The Thing About Jellyfish, being the new kid at school isn't easy, especially when you have to follow in the footsteps of a legendary classroom prankster.When Caitlyn Breen begins her disorienting new life at Mitchell School--where the students take care of real live goats and study long-dead philosophers, and where there are only ten other students in the entire seventh grade--it seems like nobody can stop talking about some kid named Paulie Fink.Depending on whom you ask, Paulie was either a hilarious class clown, a relentless troublemaker, a hapless klutz, or an evil genius. One thing's for sure, though: The kid was totally legendary. Now he's disappeared, and Caitlyn finds herself leading a reality-show-style competition to find the school's next great Paulie Fink. With each challenge, Caitlyn struggles to understand a person she never met...but it's what she discovers about herself that most surprises her.Told in multiple voices, interviews, and documents, this funny, thought-provoking novel from the bestselling author of The Thing About Jellyfish is a memorable exploration of what makes a hero--and if anyone, or anything, is truly what it seems.