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Book Summary and Reviews of Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card

Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card

Hidden Empire

by Orson Scott Card

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Published:
  • Dec 2009, 384 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In this sequel to Card's bestselling novel Empire, Averell Torrent has become President of the United States, with enormous political and popular support and, if people only realized it, a tight grip on the reins of both political parties.  He has launched America into a get-tough, this-world-is-our-empire foreign policy stance.

But Captain Bartholomew Coleman, known as Cole to his friends and enemies alike, sees the danger Torrent poses to American democracy and the potential disasters involved in his foreign military adventures. Cole quickly runs afoul of Torrent; on the run, he and a few friends and allies seek proof he of how Torrent orchestrated the political takeover that included assassinating a President and nearly starting a civil war.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Card combines flag-waving, political diatribe and Christian fervor in this bombastic sequel to 2007's Empire." - Publishers Weekly

"Card folds his empathic and compassionate views on politics and the human condition into compelling storytelling and believable characters..." - Library Journal

"A morality lesson for the video-arcade generation." - Kirkus Reviews

"[A]n engaging, if not finely written, parable about heroism and history and Christian faith." - The Mormon Times

This information about Hidden Empire was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Orson Scott Card Author Biography

Nobody had ever won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row until Orson Scott Card received them for Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, in 1986 and 1987. The third novel in the series, Xenocide, was published in 1991, and the fourth and seemingly final volume, Children of the Mind, was published in August 1996. Now a new novel in the Ender's series, titled Ender's Shadow, was published in August 1999 from TOR -- but it's not a sequel. Instead, it returns to the events of Ender's Game and views them from the point of view of another character, a street urchin named Bean. As with Rashomon or The Alexandria Quartet, Card discovers a new story in the midst of the old, when seeing it through other eyes. A sequel to Ender's Shadow will be published...

... Full Biography
Link to Orson Scott Card's Website

Name Pronunciation
Orson Scott Card: or-sun (named after his grandfather, Card says that Orson is a relatively popular name among Mormons and derives from the Indo-European word for bear)

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