The human body is like an exceedingly well-fortified castle, defended by billions of soldiers - some live for less than a day, others remember battles for decades, but all are essential in protecting us from disease. This hidden army is our immune system, and without it we could not survive the eternal war between our microscopic enemies and ourselves. Immune explores the incredible arsenal that lives within us - how it knows what to attack and what to defend, and how it kills everything from the common cold virus to plague bacteria.We see what happens when the immune system turns on us, and how life is impossible without its protection. We learn how diseases try to evade the immune system and exploit its vulnerabilities, and we discover how scientists are designing new drugs to harness the power of the system to fight disease. Do transplants ever reject their new bodies? What is pus? How can your body make more antibodies than there are stars in our galaxy? Why is cancer so hard for o
Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies. "History on the grand scale...An ambitious portrait of one of the most remarkable episodes in modern history."--New York Times"Wonderfully inclusive; with wit and intense curiosity he teases out meaning from every aspect of Dutch seventeenth-century life."--Robert Hughes
Say “algae” and most people think of pond scum. What they don’t know is that without algae, none of us would exist. There are as many algae on Earth as stars in the universe, and the
It's been eight months since all the adults disappeared. Gone. They've survived hunger. They've survived lies. But the stakes keep rising, and the dystopian horror keeps building. Yet despite the s
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.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 w
“Randy Shilts and Laurie Garrett told the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, respectively. Now journalist-historian-activist Emily Bass tells the story of US en
My Side of the Story is a completely unique approach to historical fiction. Read the story of one youngster's life in turbulent times, then flip the book and find out firsthand how another child react
