Showing titles in Disaster Relief

Brought to you by Penguin. The dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst...

Brought to you by Penguin. Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been shaken to its core three times. September 11, 2001, the financial collapse of 2008 and - most of all - COVID-19. Each was an asymmetrical threat, different from anything the world had experienced before. Fareed Zakaria...

The inside story of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air, combatted a public health crisis, and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression. "A sensational book ... It's a marvelous account of what took place." —Warren Buffett By February...

Our ability to foresee and protect against natural catastrophes has never been greater; yet we consistently fail to heed the warnings and protect ourselves and our communities, with devastating consequences. What explains this contradiction? In The Ostrich Paradox, Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther draw on years of teaching and research to explain why disaster preparedness efforts consistently fall short.

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 'An insightful and important book, that often reads like a good thriller, and that exposes the danger of mixing powerful technology with irresponsible politics' - Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens 'As moving as it is painstakingly researched. . . a...

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. 

An Observer ‘book to look out for’ in 2026 A New Scientist pick for 2026 The Surge is a timely, gripping account of humanity’s battle against rising waters — and the urgent choices we must make for our future. Rising waters are flooding cities and homes across the globe, from Florida to...

With real-world considerations in mind, disaster preparedness consultant David Black shows us how to stay alive when tragedy strikes. His step-by-step actions can help us make it safely through a variety of crises, from catastrophic weather to terrorism to civil unrest. Black presents tailor-made plans for individuals, businesses, organizations, small groups, and communities to follow, in all regions of the country and broken down by type of emergency and environment.

The deadliest storm in modern history ripped Pakistan in two and led the world to the brink of nuclear war when American and Soviet forces converged in the Bay of Bengal In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a...

‘People often say that non-fiction books read like fast-moving thrillers, but this one genuinely does… This is a splendid book – and highly recommended.’ Daily Mail A remarkable piece of investigative journalism into one of the most pervasive and troubling mysteries of recent memory. 01...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared. “Fascinating, frightening, and beyond timely.”—Anderson Cooper Imagine a...

Unlock the secrets of survival with this riveting expedition into the science of disaster—now revised and updated to address the pandemic, the role of social media in disaster response, and more—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World Disaster can come in...

Agent Orange, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the Virginia Tech massacre, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Deep Horizon gulf oil spill: Each was a disaster in its own right. What they had in common was their aftermath - each required compensation for lives lost, bodies maimed, livelihoods wrecked, economies and ecosystems upended. In each instance, an objective third party had to step up and dole out allocated funds: In each instance, Presidents, Attorneys General, and other public officials have asked Kenneth R. Feinberg to get the job done.

Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Domestic crackdowns. Economic collapse. Riots. Wars. Disease. Starvation. What can you do when it all hits the fan? You can learn to be self-sufficient and survive without the system. "I've started to look at the world through apocalypse eyes." So begins...

A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

In 2005, 15 workers were killed when BP's Texas City Refinery exploded. In 2006, corroded pipes owned by BP led to an oil spill in Alaska. Now, in 2010, 11 men drilling for BP were killed in the blowout of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. What's next? In In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race That Took It Down, Stanley Reed - a journalist who has covered BP for over a decade - and investigative reporter Alison Fitzgerald answer not only that question, but also examine why these disasters happen to BP so much more than other large oil companies.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

A tremendous upheaval is coming this century: with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we can and should do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migration will remake the world in the 21st century, either by accident, or design—and as Royal Society Science Prize-winning science journalist Gaia Vince shows us, far better the latter.

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.