The world after the nuclear war was a wasteland, and nature was radiating with extraordinary vitality! The world was shrouded in green, and the lush woodlands had become a paradise for all living beings to hunt and evolve! The former hegemon of humanity had become the lowest level of existence in the food chain, surviving tenaciously and with great difficulty! The gears of history have begun to turn again, beginning with the Dirty Valley.
The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the Year Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.
The term 'natural disaster' is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase 'natural disaster' suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth. At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed. The updated new edition confronts a further ten years of ever more expensive and deadly disasters and discusses disaster not as an aberration, but as a signal failure of mainstream 'development'. Two analytical models are provided as tools for understanding vulnerability. One links remote and distant 'root causes' to 'unsafe conditions' in a 'progression of vulnerability'. The other uses the concepts of 'access' and 'livelihood' to understand why some households are more vulnerable than others. Examining key natural events and incorporating strategies to create a safer world, this revised edition is an important resource for those involved in the fields of environment and development studies.
In the last surviving human city, an ex-spy gets sucked into a dangerous quest that will take him beyond the city walls when a winged man turns up dead in his morgue in this innovative and original dystopian space adventure. Spearpoint, the last human city, is an enormous atmosphere-piercing spire. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .
After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused major disruptions to education around the world. Since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, most students on the planet were affected by the interruption of in-person schooling. To mitigate the educational loss such interruption would cause, education authorities the world over created a variety of alternative mechanisms of education delivery. They did so quickly and with insufficient knowledge about what would work well, for which children, and for what aspects of the schooling experience.Having to create such alternative arrangements in short order was the ultimate adaptive leadership challenge, one for which no playbook existed, one for which solutions would have to be invented, rather than drawn from existing technical knowledge. The nature of the challenge differed across the world and regions, and it differed also within countries as a function of the differential public health and economic impact of the pandemic on communities, and of variations in institutional and financial resources available to redress such impact, including availability of digital infrastructure and previous knowledge and experience of teachers and students with digi-pedagogies and other resources to create alternative education delivery systems.Sustaining educational opportunities amidst these challenges created by the pandemic was an example of adaptive education response not to a unique unexpected challenge but to one in a larger class of problems, just one of the many adaptive conundrums facing communities and societies. Beyond the challenges resulting from the pandemic, other complications of that sort predating the pandemic included those resulting from poverty, inequality, social inclusion, governance, climate change, among others. In some ways, the pandemic served as an accelerant for some of those, augmenting their impact or underscoring the urgency of addressing them. Adaptive puzzles of this sort, including pandemics, are likely to continue to impact education systems in the foreseeable future. This makes it necessary to strengthen the capacity of education systems to respond to them.Reimagining education systems so they are resilient in the face of adaptive challenges is an opportunity to mobilize new talent and institutional resources. Partnerships between school systems and universities can contribute to those reimagined and more resilient systems, they can enhance the institutional capacity of education systems to devise solutions and to implement them. Such partnerships are also an opportunity for universities to be more deliberate in integrating their three core functions of research, teaching and outreach in service of addressing significant social challenges in a context in rapid flux.In this book we present the results of one approach to produce the integration between research, teaching and outreach just described, resulting from engaging graduate students in collaborations with school systems for the purpose of helping identify ways to sustain educational opportunity during the disruption caused by the pandemic. This activity engaged our students in research and analysis, contributing to their education, and it engaged them in service to society. The book examines what happened to educational opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, Belize, the municipality of Santa Ana in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya, in the States of Sinaloa and Quintana Roo in Mexico, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and in the United States in Richardson Independent School District in Texas. It offers an systematic analysis of policy options to sustain educational opportunity during the pandemic.
The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Jeff faces horrifying ultimatums and the prospect of Darkenfloxx(TM) in some unusual drug trials; and Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile that he hopes will make him popular. With dark visions of the future riffing against ghosts of the past and the ever-settling present, this collection sings with astonishing charm and intensity.
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps. For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century. "Masterly"-The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year
