Here, with his remorseless eye for the truth, the bestselling author of Liar's Poker turns his sights on his own domestic world. The result is a wickedly enjoyable cautionary tale. Lewis reveals his own unique take on fatherhood, dealing with the big issues and challenges of new-found paternity: from discovering your three-year-old loves to swear to the ethics of taking your offspring gambling at the races, from the carnage of clothing and feeding to the inevitable tantrums - of both parent and child - and the gradual realization that, despite everything, he's becoming hooked. Home Game is probably the most brazenly honest and entertaining book about parenting ever written.
The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. Now a mini-series drama starring Julianna Margulies, Topher Grace, Liam Cunningham, James D'Arcy, and Noah Emmerich on National Geographic. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." --Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review From "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about terminal cancer and the author's relationship with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the clichés and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next--alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals--and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers--Lessing and herself. From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.
This reader offers some of the most important writing to date from the science of COVID-19 and what science says about its spread and social implications. The readings have been carefully selected, introduced, and interpreted for an introductory or graduate student readership by a distinguished medical sociology and political science team. While some of the early science was inaccurate, lacking sufficient data, or otherwise incomplete, the author team has selected the most important and reliable early work for teachers and students in courses on medical sociology, public health, nursing, infectious diseases, epidemiology, anthropology of medicine, sociology of health and illness, social aspects of medicine, comparative health systems, health policy and management, health behaviors, and community health. Global in scope, the book tells the story of what happened and how COVID-19 was dealt with. Much of this material is in clinical journals, normally not considered in the social sciences, which are nonetheless informative and authoritative for student and faculty readers. Their selection and interpretation for students makes this concise reader an essential teaching source about COVID-19. An accompanying online resource on the book’s Routledge web page will update and evolve by providing links to new readings as the science develops.
This volume presents a comprehensive account of the COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the novel coronavirus pandemic, as it happened. Originating in China in late 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak spread across the entire world in a matter of three to four months. This volume examines the first responses to the pandemic, the contexts of earlier epidemics and the epidemiological basics of infectious diseases. Further, it discusses patterns in the spread of the disease; the management and containment of infections at the personal, national and global level; effects on trade and commerce; the social and psychological impact on people; the disruption and postponement of international events; the role of various international organizations like the WHO in the search for solutions; and the race for a vaccine or a cure. Authored by a medical professional and an economist working on the frontlines, this book gives a nuanced, verified and fact-checked analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic and its global response. A one-stop resource on the COVID-19 outbreak, it is indispensable for every reader and a holistic work for scholars and researchers of medical sociology, public health, political economy, public policy and governance, sociology of health and medicine, and paramedical and medical practitioners. It will also be a great resource for policymakers, government departments and civil society organizations working in the area.
Education has undergone numerous radical changes as the digital era has transformed the way we as humans communicate, inform ourselves, purchase goods, and perform other mundane chores at home and at work. Social media is one of those phenomena that has affected not only society at large but has heavily influenced educational processes around the world. The demand for and availability of networked educational services have also increased, enabling online education to gain popularity and become an internationally accessible option. Furthermore, universities and other private higher educational institutions embrace digital technology and have adopted the new learning medium as they realize the prospects of having the world’s population as a potential source of revenue. A related phenomenon has been the proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs). These have changed the ways in which learners interact with educational institutions, professors, and with each other. At the same time, the upsurge in digital education has raised issues with language as online learners from all over the world and from a plethora of cultures and foreign languages have found themselves challenged to take full advantage and optimally benefit from the same educational media and resources that English-speaking counterparts have tapped into. Digital Pedagogies and the Transformation of Language Education will answer questions of how to optimize language learning in such a defining new era and what the educational, sociological, and technological dimensions of radical change are. The book will explore the different challenges and the multitude of opportunities that new and transformative pedagogies have enabled. Beyond teaching/learning practices being presented, this book also focuses on how learners will adjust to the technology and the readiness of practitioners to psychologically adjust to the changing and demanding media technology has unleashed. The chapters provide international experiences and perspectives on the impact of e-educational technologies on student experience, success, learning, and comprehension in the realm of language learning specifically. This book is essential for educational technologists, online instructional designers, education policymakers and administrators, curriculum developers, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in digital language pedagogies.
Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.
"An inspiring and informative page-turner." –Walter Isaacson Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award The authoritative account of the race to produce the vaccines that are saving us all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Solved the Market Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world’s biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn’t muster an effective response. It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization. A French businessman dismissed by many as a fabulist. A Turkish immigrant with little virus experience. A quirky Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells. A Boston scientist employing questionable techniques. A British scientist despised by his peers. Far from the limelight, each had spent years developing innovative vaccine approaches. Their work was met with skepticism and scorn. By 2020, these individuals had little proof of progress. Yet they and their colleagues wanted to be the ones to stop the virus holding the world hostage. They scrambled to turn their life’s work into life-saving vaccines in a matter of months, each gunning to make the big breakthrough—and to beat each other for the glory that a vaccine guaranteed. A #1 New York Times bestselling author and award-winning Wall Street Journal investigative journalist lauded for his “bravura storytelling” (Gary Shteyngart) and “first-rate” reporting (The New York Times), Zuckerman takes us inside the top-secret laboratories, corporate clashes, and high-stakes government negotiations that led to effective shots. Deeply reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It’s a story of courage, genius, and heroism. It’s also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities, and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.
"The most revealing pandemic book yet."—The Atlantic The definitive, inside account of the Trump Administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic from White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and Coronavirus Task Force member, Dr. Deborah Birx. In late February 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx—a lifelong federal health official who had worked at the CDC, the State Department, and the US Army across multiple presidential administrations—was asked to join the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force and assist the already faltering federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. For weeks, she’d been raising the alarm behind the scenes about what she saw happening in public—from the apparent lack of urgency at the White House to the routine downplaying of the risks to Americans. Once in the White House, she was tasked with helping fix the broken federal approach and making President Trump see the danger this virus posed to all of us. Silent Invasion is the story of what she witnessed and lived for the next year—an eye-opening, inside account, detailed here for the first time, of the Trump Administration’s response to the greatest public health crisis in modern times. Regarded with suspicion in the West Wing from day one, Dr. Birx goes beyond the media speculation and political maneuvering to show what she was really up against in the Trump White House. Digging into the hard-fought victories, the costly mistakes, and the human drama surrounding the administration’s efforts, she examines the forces that crippled efforts to control the virus and explores why these blunders continue to haunt us today. And yet amid the agonizing missteps were bright spots that point the way forward—the fastest vaccine creation in history, governors that put their citizens’ health first, and Tribal Nations that demonstrated the powerful role of community in curbing spread, despite their criminally underfunded healthcare systems. Collectively these successes reveal the valiant work of many who were committed to saving lives, as well as highlighting the dire need to reform our public health institutions, so they are nimble and resilient enough to confront the next pandemic. With the pandemic now moving into its third year confounding two presidential administrations, Dr. Birx presents a story at once urgent and frustratingly unfinished, as Covid-19 continues to put thousands of American lives at risk. The end result is the most comprehensive and extensive accounting to date of the Trump Administration’s struggle to control the biggest health crisis in generations—a revelatory look at how we can learn from our mistakes and prevent this from happening again.
"Chan and Ridley write with an urgency...that inspires gripping depictions of what viruses are, how infectious-disease laboratories work and wonderfully lucid descriptions of bats. . . . They powerfully recount how dangerous pathogens can both leak from a lab and emerge in nature." (New York Times Book Review) Understanding how Covid-19 started is crucial for the future of humankind. Viral is the most incisive and authoritative book about the search for the source of the virus. A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometres away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travellers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings. To try to solve this pressing mystery, Viral delves deep into the events of 2019 leading up to 2021, the details of what went on in animal markets and virology laboratories, the records and data hidden from sight within archived Chinese theses and websites, and the clues that can be coaxed from the very text of the virus’s own genetic code. The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery. One by one the authors explore promising tunnels only to show that they are blind alleys, until, miles beneath the surface, they find themselves tantalisingly close to a shaft that leads to the light.
