The Cure for Catastrophe

The Cure for Catastrophe
Author: Robert Muir-Wood
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0465096476

We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.

The Cure for Grief

The Cure for Grief
Author: Nellie Hermann
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2008-08-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416568239

Deeply bonded to her three older brothers and in awe of her father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor, young Ruby is shocked when her eldest brother is abruptly taken away to a hospital, where he changes into a person she barely recognizes. 35,000 first printing.

Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe: A Graphix Chapters Book (Mimi #1)

Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe: A Graphix Chapters Book (Mimi #1)
Author: Shauna J. Grant
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1338766686

Rising star Shauna J. Grant makes her Graphix Chapters debut with this humorous and wholesome series. Get drawn into reading with Graphix Chapters! Graphix Chapters are ideal books for beginning and newly independent readers aged 6-8. With approachable page counts, easy-to-follow paneling, and artwork that supports text comprehension, these engaging stories with unforgettable characters help children become lifelong readers. Meet Mimi. She's charming! She's cheerful! She's cute! But that's not all! She's also a loyal friend and fun playmate, who has the best adventures with Penelope, her magical toy dog. But when Mimi notices people treating her like she's too cute, can she show them that she's much more than meets the eye? Or will she be stuck in this cute-astrophe?

Golden Holocaust

Golden Holocaust
Author: Robert N. Proctor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 779
Release: 2012-02-28
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0520950437

The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.

The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1429919485

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

Catastrophe Time!

Catastrophe Time!
Author: Gary Zhexi Zhang
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1913689670

A collection of essays, fictions, and interviews exploring the weird temporalities of finance and catastrophe. Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients the mood of terrestrial markets. Bringing together artists, researchers, and interstitial practitioners, Catastrophe Time! pays attention to the conditions of speculative knowledge on an increasingly volatile planet. Traversing a gray zone between rigorous research and operative science fictions, its contributors question how practices of speculation may transform, undermine, and at times exceed, the worlds they set out to model. Edited by artist Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time! explores the power of temporal technologies—whether currencies, conspiracies, or simulation models—to shape reality through fiction. By bringing together researchers and writers working at the boundaries of temporal practices, including Diann Bauer, Philip Grant, Bahar Noorizadeh, Habib William Kherbek, Klara Kofen, Kei Kreutler, Suhail Malik, Bassem Saad and Gordon Woo, this urgent volume seeks to make sense of the unraveling times in which we live.

How We Can Halt the Cipro and Levaquin Catastrophe

How We Can Halt the Cipro and Levaquin Catastrophe
Author: Jay Cohen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2015-10-25
Genre:
ISBN: 9781518626869

This book is about the powerful, sometimes lifesaving, yet sometimes highly destructive antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones. Best known of these drugs are Cipro (ciprofloxacin) and Levaquin (levofloxacin), as well as four others. This book, How We Can Halt the Cipro and Levaquin Catastrophe: the Worst Medication Disaster in U.S. History, has two main goals. The first goal is to alert patients and doctors of the truly destructive capability of these drugs to cause serious, sometimes long term, sometimes permanent injuries. The capacity of these drugs for such damage has been attested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and others many times and is by now incontrovertible. Hundreds of patients, many of whom are quoted in this book, have confirmed their long-lasting injuries to me, while many hundreds more have been ignored or dismissed by their doctors. This must stop. Ignoring these problems has only made the problem worse. My second goal in writing How We Can Halt the Cipro and Levaquin Catastrophe: the Worst Medication Disaster in U.S. History is to stimulate the interest of government, the drug industry, medical institutions and all others for any and all ideas regarding remedies, solutions, and any other ideas that may help end the suffering experienced by patients with the Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome that can affect many human systems including the musculoskeletal, nervous, psychiatric, gastrointestinal, and others. As you will see, I have offered some ideas for therapies that may provide benefit to some of the injured. I think it is imperative that we follow a trail that may lead us to an understanding of how these drugs work and particularly how they injure, and most of all how we might help people heal, obtain pain reduction and hope. Thousands of lives, young and old, depend on the efforts that we make.

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe
Author: Stefanos Geroulanos
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2018-08-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 022655662X

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

Sudden Sea

Sudden Sea
Author: R. A. Scotti
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2008-12-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 031605478X

The massive destruction wreaked by the Hurricane of 1938 dwarfed that of the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the Mississippi floods of 1927, making the storm the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Now, R.A. Scotti tells the story.

The Literature of Catastrophe

The Literature of Catastrophe
Author: Carlos Fonseca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501350641

This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar's manifestoes to Cesar Aira's use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas' posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.