Author: Fred D'Aguiar
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063091542
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope. For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D’Aguiar was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, D’Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from two cultural perspectives—his Caribbean upbringing and his American lifestyle—D’Aguiar’s beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease. In his first work of nonfiction, D’Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the lyrical to the quotidian, from the metaphysical to the personal. While his experience could not be darker, its rendering is tinged with light and joy, captured in prose that unfolds in wonderful, unexpected ways. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.
Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593320735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.
Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224722
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704
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Book Description
A sweeping germ’s-eye view of history from human origins to global pandemics Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases. Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself. Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.
Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000631842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.
Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Gallic Books
ISBN: 1913547256
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
Author and illustrator Edward Carey presents a paean to connection at a time of isolation: a year of daily lockdown drawings posted on social media from his home in Texas. 'This book contains magic' A.L. Kennedy In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey published a sketch on social media with a plan to keep posting a drawing a day from his family home in Austin, Texas, until life returned to normal. One hundred and fifty pencil stubs later, he was still drawing. Carey's hand moved with world events, chronicling pandemic and politics. It reached into the past, taking inspiration from history, and escaped grim reality through flights of vivid imagination and studies of the natural world. The drawings became a way of charting time, of moving forward, and maintaining connection at a time of isolation. This remarkable collection of words and drawings from the acclaimed author of Little and The Swallowed Man charts a tumultuous year in pencil, finding beauty amid the horror of extraordinary times.
Author: Stephanie S. Tolan
Publisher: Harper Trophy
ISBN: 9780688161255
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Sixteen-year-old David becomes intimately involved when a scandal is discovered about the strange new boy in his high school and everyone else turns against him.
Author: Jeff Carlson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780441015146
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
When the nanotechnology designed to fight cancer evolves into a machine plague, killing nearly five billion people, a group of survivors, struggling to stay alive, places their faith in a top nanotech researcher who has discovered the plague's one weakness. Original.
Author: Edward Bloor
Publisher: Ember
ISBN: 0375846093
Category : Coal mine accidents
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
A ninth-grader who works with his father in the local supermarket describes the plague of meth addiction that consumes many people in his Pennsylvania coal mining town from 9/11 and the nearby crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville to the Quecreek Mine disaster in Somerset the following summer.
Author: William Boghurst
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drugs
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Author: Hugh Cameron
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1664157301
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
The original Journal of the Plague Year was written by Daniel Defoe in 1639. Plagues have been a recurrent fact of life since humans have existed. A virus or a bacterium makes the jump either from an animal or from a tribe who have long been habituated to the organism, and this novel infection races through the newly exposed populace, and a huge die-off of the new hosts occurs. The last major event was the Spanish influenza at the end of WWI. There have been events of concern such as SARS and Ebola, with other lesser events such as H1N1, MERS, and Hong Kong flu. While these potentially were a major problem, the Wuhan virus has turned out to be a new plague of disastrous dimensions. It remains to be seen if the catastrophic subsequent events were due to the virus itself or the hysterical overreaction to it. As an experienced doctor, with a large active clinical practice, I found I was often being asked the same questions as many patients were totally confused by the media and the changing and contradictory pronouncement from politicians and public health. I found I was answering so many questions in the office and on Facebook that it came to me, in April of 2020, that what I was doing was in fact compiling a “Journal of a Plague Year.” This book is a collection of sequential posts, almost all completely unedited. Also included were some questions and my answers.
