Why Ignorance, Stupidity and Violence Plague Mankind! PDF Download

Author: John Froude
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1953295363
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
From the Black Death to Covid-19, pandemics have shaped and reshaped human society. Science and history can give us insight into two urgent questions: Why do they persist? And how can we survive them? Pandemics have been with us since Homo sapiens appeared on earth nearly 300,000 years ago. Forty percent of our genes are made of DNA from viruses. Yet we still remain vulnerable. Today, we are engulfed by a new pandemic: SARS-CoV-2 or the coronavirus that originated in China and, within four months, had spread to every country in the world. Thanks to advances in molecular biology and new tools with which to probe them, we are also in the midst of a golden age of understanding when it comes to our tiniest enemies. DNA technology is rewriting history, resolving disputes that have persisted for decades—and giving us crucial insights that may safeguard our future. Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. John Froude has worked on four continents over nearly 50 years, treating sufferers of plagues that arose over a century ago and never left us (like malaria and cholera) and battling new threats (like AIDS and Covid-19) as they emerge. In Plagued, he offers a gripping and timely account of the pandemics that have driven our evolution and shaped our history. Plagued tells the stories of yellow fever, smallpox, syphilis, the bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and Covid-19. Blending science and narrative, Froude explores not only the unstoppable march of pestilence and its effects, but our intimate relationship with bacteria and viruses. He also explores the complex wonder that is human immunity, which itself is the consequence of an arms race between microbes and our animal ancestors that started 3.5 billion years ago. Along the way, we meet the dogged geniuses who have brought us back from the brink and see what it might take to do it again. Plagues arise without warning. But as we watch the current cataclysm unfold in real time, we have a unique opportunity to forge a path ahead that avoids both denial and panic. This timely book illustrates how lessons from the past, both distant and recent, may be the key to understanding why pandemics continue to plague us, and what can be done to stop them.

Author: Alan P. Zelicoff
Publisher: Amacom Books
ISBN: 9780814428832
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Whether a virus is unintentionally released via our modern transportation system, or deliberately by terrorists, even a small scale biological event could have a profound effect on our society. Yet our current public health system is completely unprepared to detect and respond quickly enough to avert a disease related crisis.

Author: William McNeill
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307773663
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures. "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Plagues and Peoples is "a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is essential reading—that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening.

Author:
Publisher: Cultural-Insight Books
ISBN: 0914778749
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Author: D. Ann Herring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000181553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Until recently, plagues were thought to belong in the ancient past. Now there are deep worries about global pandemics. This book presents views from anthropology about this much publicized and complex problem. The authors take us to places where epidemics are erupting, waning, or gone, and to other places where they have not yet arrived, but where a frightening story line is already in place. They explore public health bureaucracies and political arenas where the power lies to make decisions about what is, and is not, an epidemic. They look back into global history to uncover disease trends and look ahead to a future of expanding plagues within the context of climate change. The chapters are written from a range of perspectives, from the science of modeling epidemics to the social science of understanding them. Patterns emerge when people are engulfed by diseases labeled as epidemics but which have the hallmarks of plague. There are cycles of shame and blame, stigma, isolation of the sick, fear of contagion, and end-of-the-world scenarios. Plague, it would seem, is still among us.

Author: Alice Kaplan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity. Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.

Author: Henry Halford Vaughan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 750

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Author: Wendy Orent
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743236850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Chronicles the history and mystery of several centuries of plague including bioweapons programs initiated by the former Soviet Union.

Author: Donald Emmeluth
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438101600
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Plague has erupted in periodic outbreaks for almost as long as human history has been recorded. Its easy transmission has been responsible for some of the most severe death rates from any epidemic disease in history.