The Invisible Siege

The Invisible Siege
Author: Dan Werb
Publsiher: Crown
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780593239247

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“A journey into the origins of COVID-19 and the discovery of vaccines and potential cures . . . I learned so much that I didn’t know before—above all, I met the subtle warriors of the laboratory who are working to save all of us from the horror of new pandemics.”—Richard Preston, bestselling author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer One of Publishers Weekly’s top ten science books of the season The urgency of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic has fixed humanity’s gaze on the present crisis. But the story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. In this engrossing narrative, epidemiologist Dan Werb traces the rising threat of the coronavirus family and the attempts by a small group of scientists who worked for decades to stop a looming viral pandemic. When virologist Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s, the field was a scientific backwater—the few variants that infected humans caused little more than the common cold. But when a novel coronavirus sparked the 2003 SARS epidemic, and then the MERS epidemic a decade later, Baric and his allies realized that time was running out before a pandemic strain would make the inevitable jump from animals to human hosts. In The Invisible Siege, Werb unpacks the dynamic history and microscopic complexity of an organism that has wreaked cycles of havoc upon the world for millennia. Elegantly tracing decades of scientific investigation, Werb’s book reveals how Baric’s team of scientists hatched an audacious plan not merely to battle COVID-19 but to end pandemics forever. Yet as they raced to find a cure, they ran into a complicated nexus of science, ethics, industry, and politics that threatened to derail their efforts just as COVID-19 loomed ever larger. The Invisible Siege is an urgent and moving testament to the unprecedented scientific movement to stop COVID-19—and a powerful look at the infuriating factors that threaten to derail discovery and leave the world vulnerable to the inevitable coronaviruses to come.

The Invisible Siege

The Invisible Siege
Author: Dan Werb
Publsiher: Crown
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780593239230

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“A journey into the origins of COVID-19 and the discovery of vaccines and potential cures . . . I learned so much that I didn’t know before—above all, I met the subtle warriors of the laboratory who are working to save all of us from the horror of new pandemics.”—Richard Preston, bestselling author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize • One of Publishers Weekly’s top ten science books of the season The urgency of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic has fixed humanity’s gaze on the present crisis. But the story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. In this engrossing narrative, epidemiologist Dan Werb traces the rising threat of the coronavirus family and the attempts by a small group of scientists who worked for decades to stop a looming viral pandemic. When virologist Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s, the field was a scientific backwater—the few variants that infected humans caused little more than the common cold. But when a novel coronavirus sparked the 2003 SARS epidemic, and then the MERS epidemic a decade later, Baric and his allies realized that time was running out before a pandemic strain would make the inevitable jump from animals to human hosts. In The Invisible Siege, Werb unpacks the dynamic history and microscopic complexity of an organism that has wreaked cycles of havoc upon the world for millennia. Elegantly tracing decades of scientific investigation, Werb’s book reveals how Baric’s team of scientists hatched an audacious plan not merely to battle COVID-19 but to end pandemics forever. Yet as they raced to find a cure, they ran into a complicated nexus of science, ethics, industry, and politics that threatened to derail their efforts just as COVID-19 loomed ever larger. The Invisible Siege is an urgent and moving testament to the unprecedented scientific movement to stop COVID-19—and a powerful look at the infuriating factors that threaten to derail discovery and leave the world vulnerable to the inevitable coronaviruses to come.

City of Omens

City of Omens
Author: Dan Werb
Publsiher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781635573008

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For decades, American hungers sustained Tijuana. In this scientific detective story, a public health expert reveals what happens when a border city's lifeline is brutally severed. Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice, Tijuana was, until recently, no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego, its sister city across the border wall. But then something changed. Over the past ten years, Mexico's third-largest city became one of the world's most dangerous. Tijuana's murder rate skyrocketed and produced a staggering number of female victims. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year, or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast. When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013, rather than viewing them in isolation, he discovered that they could only be understood as one symptom among many. Environmental toxins, drug overdoses, HIV transmission: all were killing women at overwhelming rates. As an epidemiologist, trained to track epidemics by mining data, Werb sensed the presence of a deeper contagion targeting Tijuana's women. Not a virus, but some awful wrong buried in the city's social order, cutting down its most vulnerable inhabitants from multiple directions. Werb's search for the ultimate causes of Tijuana's femicide casts new light on immigration, human trafficking, addiction, and the true cost of American empire-building. It leads Werb all the way from factory slums to drug dens to the corridors of police corruption, as he follows a thread that ultimately leads to a surprising turn back over the border, looking northward. “City of Omens is a compelling and disturbing tour of a border world that outsiders rarely see - and simultaneously, a clear guide to a field of public health that offers an essential framework for understanding how both ideas and diseases can spread.” -- MAIA SZALAVITZ, author of Unbroken Brain “Dan Werb combines his expertise as a trained epidemiologist with his keen discernment as an investigative journalist to depict what happens when poverty, human desperation, and unfathomable greed at the highest levels of a society mix with imperial ambition and a criminally ill-conceived policy towards drug use. It is a riveting and heartbreaking story, told with eloquence and compassion.” -- GABOR MATÉ, MD, bestselling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction “City of Omens is an urgent and needed account of a desperate problem. The perils that Mexico's women face haunt the conscience of a nation.” -- ALFREDO CORCHADO, author of Homelands and Midnight in Mexico

The Invisible People

The Invisible People
Author: Greg Behrman
Publsiher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2008-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781439103616

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The Invisible People is a revealing and at times shocking look inside the United States's response to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known -- the global AIDS crisis. A true story of politics, bureaucracy, disease, internecine warfare, and negligence, it illustrates that while the pandemic constitutes a profound threat to U.S. economic and security interests, at every turn the United States has failed to act in the face of this pernicious menace. During the past twenty years, more than 65 million people across the globe have become infected with HIV. Already 25 million around the world have died -- more than all of the battle deaths in the twentieth century combined. By decade's end there will be an estimated 25 million AIDS orphans. If trends continue, by 2025, 250 million global HIV-AIDS cases are a distinct possibility. Beyond the ineffable human toll, the pandemic is reshaping the social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions of our world. Eviscerating national economies, creating an entire generation of orphans, and destroying military capacity, the disease is generating pressures that will lead to instability and possibly even state failure and collapse in sub-Saharan Africa. Poised to explode in Eastern Europe, Russia, India, and China, AIDS will have devastating and destabilizing effects of untold proportions that will reverberate throughout the global economy and the international political order. In this gripping account that draws on more than two hundred interviews with key political insiders, policy makers, and thinkers, Greg Behrman chronicles the red tape, colossal blunders, monumental egos, power plays, and human pain and suffering that comprise America's woeful response to the AIDS crisis. Behrman's unprecedented access takes you inside the halls of power from seminal White House meetings to tumultuous turf battles at World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, heated debates in the United Nations, and chilling discoveries at the Centers for Disease Control. Behrman also brings us into the field to meet the people who live in the midst of AIDS devastation in places like a school yard in Namibia, the red-light district in Bombay, and an orphanage in South Africa. Intensely researched and vividly detailed, The Invisible People is a groundbreaking and compellingly readable account of the appalling destruction caused by more than two decades of American abdication in the face of the defining humanitarian catastrophe of our time.

Invisible Crises

Invisible Crises
Author: George Gerbner
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780429968198

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According to the contributors to this volume, the communications media deliberately blank out critical conditions and developments whose imagery would pose unacceptable challenges to the dominant structures of culture-power. Such "invisible crises" include the suppression of information about the dehumanization and stigmatization of groups of people; the drift toward ecological suicide; the neglect of vital institutions such as public education and the arts; the way in which television corrupts the electoral process; and the promotion of practices which drug, poison and kill. The book asks why the media are, in the view of contributors, withholding vital information from the public, and focuses on the increasing concentration of culture-power that, it is argued, keeps these truths from public view.

The Invisible Kingdom

The Invisible Kingdom
Author: Meghan O'Rourke
Publsiher: Penguin
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780698190764

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION Named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by NPR, The New Yorker, Time, and Vogue “Remarkable.” –Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review "At once a rigorous work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy.”—Esquire "A ray of light into those isolated cocoons of darkness that, at one time or another, may afflict us all.” —The Wall Street Journal "Essential."—The Boston Globe A landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color. Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

The Mostly Invisible Boy Casey Grimes

The Mostly Invisible Boy  Casey Grimes
Author: Aj Vanderhorst
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-05-08
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: 9798500951472

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★ Silver, Wishing Shelf Book Awards! ★ Bronze, Readers' Favorite International Awards Contest! This "wildly imaginative" (Book Pipeline) "splendid conception" (Kirkus) from upstart author AJ Vanderhorst celebrates the transformative power of courage, tenacity and a little skill with a battle-axe. Set in an alternate USA where monsters prowl, this debut novel is told from the perspective of mostly-invisible-but-still-hopeful Casey Grimes. Eleven-year-old Casey is stubbornly friendly, but he's eternally the new kid at Vintage Woods Middle School. Students look right through him-and they're not faking. Casey doesn't know why he's mostly-invisible, but when he scales a colossal oak, he discovers a fortress in its branches. The forgotten sentry tree marks the border between his safe, suburban life and a fierce frontier. Casey and his little sister Gloria infiltrate Sylvan Woods, a secret forest society devoted to ancient, wild things. Sky-high footpaths. Survival sewing. Monster control. Shockingly, people here actually see Casey-but being seen isn't enough. He wants to belong. Keeping his identity hidden--while struggling to prove he fits--is hard enough, but Butcher Beasts have returned to Sylvan Woods after a hundred years. Trickery is under siege. As the monsters close in, and the fearsome Sylvan Watch hunts Casey down, he and his newfound friends must unearth abandoned magic, buried at the forest's roots...or be devoured along with everyone else, Sylvans and civilians alike. A fast-paced middle grade fantasy/adventure book with all the monsters kids could ever hope for.

World Under Siege

World Under Siege
Author: Suhas Inamdar
Publsiher: Notion Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2021-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781638865834

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The American Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly develops a special server with the help of an Indian IT company, which can anticipate the actions of intelligence units of various nations by using a powerful algorithm. The CIA plans to use it to preempt the cyber-attacks before they are unleashed by the rogue nations. However, the Secret Server is stolen in a daring heist while in transit to the US. It is protected by a 32-digit password. Even the most powerful hacking machine would take three months to decode it. If it falls in the wrong hands, it could create mayhem in the world. The hunt begins to retrieve the Secret Server and save the world from an impending disaster. Would it truly read the minds of the strategists around the world? Who stole the Secret Server? Will it be recovered before the thief cracks its password? Time is running out. The world is under siege.