Cold War Steve Journal Of The Plague Year

Following the bestselling Festival of Brexit and A Prat's Progress, star satirist Cold War Steve returns with a viral vengeance with his Journal of the Plague Year. Dubbed 'the modern-day William Hogarth', the collage artist casts a searing eye back at the last year on 'Plague Island' Britain and abroad: featuring a global pandemic, an inept government at home and the US election's absurdist saga, his chronological journal spans lockdowns, G7 summits, crises and scandals, to leave no-one unscathed. Featuring the usual suspects in despicable settings, and rife with art historical references, Journal of the Plague Year brilliantly blends world news and art in signature-style collages, each accompanied by witty commentary. Published in an enlarged format, this new tome will delight Cold War Steve's huge fanbase, and anyone in need of humour after the grimness of this past plague year With 100 illustrations in colour

As Jonathan Lethem put, Steve Erickson's journal of the last 18 months of the Trump Presidency "sears the page." Erickson, one of our finest novelists, has long been an astute political observer, and American Stutter, part political declaration, part humorous account of more personal matters, offers a particularly moving reminder of the democratic ideals that we are currently struggling to preserve. Written with wit, eloquence, and a controlled fury as event unfold, Erickson has left us with an essential record of our recent history, a book to be read with our collective breath held.* Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels and two books about American culture. For 12 years he was founding editor of the national literary journal Black Clock. Currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement award.

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.

Cold War Steve has been acclaimed as the Brexit Bruegel and a modern-day Hogarth or Gillray. His Twitter feed, McFadden's Cold War, has become a cult phenomenon, with over 120,000 followers (and counting). This book contains the prime cuts of his elaborate, satirical photo collages from his Twitter feed, with further exclusive, unseen new work. Begun as a personal reprieve from an often-bleak political climate, Cold War Steve (Christopher Spencer in real life) started collaging images of longstanding Eastender Steve McFadden (aka Phil Mitchell) into Cold War-era scenarios, using a £3 smartphone app while commuting. As 'Brexit Britain' begins to take shape his output has taken an increasingly surreal, satirical turn - in what some are calling 'furious absurdism' - creating dystopian, absurdly funny Brexit-era landscapes populated with a rotating cast of political, cultural or otherwise newsworthy (or not) figures, and ever-present Fray Bentos pies. A pitch-perfect marriage of Internet meme culture and the political lampoon, Cold War Steve satirizes our increasingly incongruous-seeming popularpolitical culture with quintessentially British humour. In a time when the UK's exit from the EU looms large, Cold War Steve offers us a satirical escape from a world that seems to have slipped its moorings from reality.

Just in time for Brexit, the sequel to the Sunday Times bestselling Cold War Steve Presents... The Festival of Brexit: an absurdist journey through a world that seems to have slipped the moorings of realityAs the UK takes the leap into the dark with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Cold War Steve Presents... A Prat's Progress takes you on a coach trip from hell that trundles through a dystopian wasteland under Boris's rule. A pitch-perfect and timely piece of satire, it will provide a much needed escape from a world that seems to have not only slipped its moorings from reality but is being steered recklessly towards a 'No Deal' precipice.

This history of mankind's battles against infectious diseases looks at how epidemics shaped empires and economies and how medical revolutions freed us from these cycles until new threats arose caused by changes in global trade and climate.

The creation of the Pentagon in seventeen whirlwind months during World War II is one of the great construction feats in American history, involving a tremendous mobilization of manpower, resources, and minds. In astonishingly short order, Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell conceived and built an institution that ranks with the White House, the Vatican, and a handful of other structures as symbols recognized around the world. Now veteran military reporter Steve Vogel reveals for the first time the remarkable story of the Pentagon’s construction, from it’s dramatic birth to its rebuilding after the September 11 attack. At the center of the story is the tempestuous but courtly Somervell–“dynamite in a Tiffany box,” as he was once described. In July 1941, the Army construction chief sprang the idea of building a single, huge headquarters that could house the entire War Department, then scattered in seventeen buildings around Washington. Somervell ordered drawings produced in one weekend and, despite a firestorm of opposition, broke ground two months later, vowing that the building would be finished in little more than a year. Thousands of workers descended on the site, a raffish Virginia neighborhood known as Hell’s Bottom, while an army of draftsmen churned out designs barely one step ahead of their execution. Seven months later the first Pentagon employees skirted seas of mud to move into the building and went to work even as construction roared around them. The colossal Army headquarters helped recast Washington from a sleepy southern town into the bustling center of a reluctant empire. Vivid portraits are drawn of other key figures in the drama, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who fancied himself an architect; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, both desperate for a home for the War Department as the country prepared for battle; Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the ruthless force of nature who oversaw the Pentagon’s construction (as well as the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb); and John McShain, the charming and dapper builder who used his relationship with FDR to help land himself the contract for the biggest office building in the world. The Pentagon’s post-World War II history is told through its critical moments, including the troubled birth of the Department of Defense during the Cold War, the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the tumultuous 1967 protest against the Vietnam War. The pivotal attack on September 11 is related with chilling new detail, as is the race to rebuild the damaged Pentagon, a restoration that echoed the spirit of its creation. This study of a single enigmatic building tells a broader story of modern American history, from the eve of World War II to the new wars of the twenty-first century. Steve Vogel has crafted a dazzling work of military social history that merits comparison with the best works of David Halberstam or David McCullough. Like its namesake, The Pentagon is a true landmark.

The official account - complete with full-color illustrations - of how four ordinary people managed to expose the British government's hypocrisies through a nationwide guerrilla advertising campaign. Seeking to highlight the hypocrisy of their politicians on Brexit four friends armed with nothing more than ladders, roller brushes and a treasure trove of damning statements from their leaders slapped up the politicians' biggest lies on billboards around the country. This guerrilla operation wasn't easy, but it wasn't long before the British public enabled them to take things into their own hands - and the rest is history. Leave the EU or remain? An apparently simple question divided the nation in historic fashion. Many believed the words of these politicians. By putting up their quotes as billboards, self-styled 'Led By Donkeys' had clear intentions - to compare the promises that have been made across the years with the damning reality.