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But wasn't the whole point of "Ender's Game" that the end never justifies the means? That hurting people is never, ever right except when minutely controlled and in immediate self-defense? I don't dare to ask. I don't want to know if the book he wrote is so different than the beautiful one I read.

Ender's Shadow By Orson Scott Card Tor Books Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Ender's Game By Orson Scott Card Tor Books Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury By Donna Minkowitz Free Press Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

I ask why Bean, who is starved, is portrayed as so much more traumatized than Ender, who is repeatedly beaten up and terrorized by people he loves. Card says, "When you talk about what I said in 'Ender's Shadow,' you have to realize that Ender is seen there through the eyes of Bean, and Bean doesn't know about the stuff that went on in Ender's home. And most people have a certain threshold of pain in their past that they have to deal with. But I don't think there is anyone who would seriously argue that having been beaten up by your older brother and threatened by him constitutes the same sort of thing as a day-to-day struggle for survival in the murderous kind of street life that Bean was facing, and that a lot of Brazilian kids face today.

"I had the experiences -- well, at least I perceived myself to have had the experiences -- that I show Ender having with an older brother when I was young. I see it differently now, but I was depicting what I thought was going on when I was a little kid. And I generally look back on my childhood as being quite a [Ray] Bradbury-esque safe childhood. There were problems, and they certainly did color my life, but I faced nothing like the trauma that kids who are homeless and desperate face. There is a hierarchy of suffering."

Although I don't exactly agree, I sigh in satisfaction. Card and I have something major in common -- we both experienced violence as children. I always feel a powerful bond with other abused kids, and reading "Ender's Game," I was certain Card was "family." Now I know for sure we are brother and sister under the skin! "Your books are flamboyantly interested in violence and what it means. Are you so interested in this because of your experience with your brother?"

"Not really. It really has to do with the fact that I'm a nonviolent person and I really don't understand the impulse that well, and I try to explore it. I've seen it happen a lot. It's frightening to watch people become a mob. Violence per se I recognize as sometimes necessary, but always terrifying. When people do resort to it, I try to find out for myself at least how they justify it to themselves."

I think he's obfuscating. No one's that interested in figuring out why people hit people unless they've gotten hit a lot themselves. "You say your feelings about being hit by your brother have changed. How?"

"At the time I really took seriously the rhetoric of threat. But I was little, and he was young. And things get said in the heat of argument that aren't meant. He never intended to do me any kind of lasting harm. In fact, at the very time that he was saying those things to me in rage, he would tell my mom, she told me later, that he really loved me and cared about me and wanted to defend me if I was in danger. I listened to the threats and took them seriously, because in my naiveté I believed them." Actually, I think Card is being more naive right now, by discounting actions that obviously really hurt him.

"My reading of 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' -- when I was 10 -- probably has more to do with my returning to issues of violence. Reading about the soldier dashing the infant's head against the wall, I sobbed like a baby. That was the beginning of my putting my brother's and my conflict in perspective. He would never do that." I bite back a sarcastic retort. Card's brother was basically OK because he wasn't as bad as the Nazis? He adds, "It really was almost whimsical to base Ender's relationship with his brother on my relationship with mine."

Time for a more theoretical approach. I ask Card if he's read Richard Rhodes' book about violence, "Why They Kill." "If you buy its thesis, Ender has gone through all the stages of socialization that make someone into a 'dangerous violent criminal' -- brutalization followed with lots of coaching to be violent and with having great victories the first few times he fights an attacker."

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