The Ghost Map

Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594489259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
"It is the summer of 1854. Cholera has seized London with unprecedented intensity. A metropolis of more than 2 million people, London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure necessary to support its dense population - garbage removal, clean water, sewers - the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease that no one knows how to cure." "As their neighbors begin dying, two men are spurred to action: the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose faith in a benevolent God is shaken by the seemingly random nature of the victims, and Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion have been dismissed by the scientific community, but who is convinced that he knows how the disease is being transmitted. The Ghost Map chronicles the outbreak's spread and the desperate efforts to put an end to the epidemic - and solve the most pressing medical riddle of the age."--BOOK JACKET.

Extra Life

Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525538879
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
“Offers a useful reminder of the role of modern science in fundamentally transforming all of our lives.” —President Barack Obama (on Twitter) “An important book.” —Steven Pinker, The New York Times Book Review The surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an extra life, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come From In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over forty years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than eighty years. As a species we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity. Extra Life is Steven Johnson’s attempt to understand where that progress came from, telling the epic story of one of humanity’s greatest achievements. How many of those extra years came from vaccines, or the decrease in famines, or seatbelts? What are the forces that now keep us alive longer? Behind each breakthrough lies an inspiring story of cooperative innovation, of brilliant thinkers bolstered by strong systems of public support and collaborative networks, and of dedicated activists fighting for meaningful reform. But for all its focus on positive change, this book is also a reminder that meaningful gaps in life expectancy still exist, and that new threats loom on the horizon, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear. How do we avoid decreases in life expectancy as our public health systems face unprecedented challenges? What current technologies or interventions that could reduce the impact of future crises are we somehow ignoring? A study in how meaningful change happens in society, Extra Life celebrates the enduring power of common goals and public resources, and the heroes of public health and medicine too often ignored in popular accounts of our history. This is the sweeping story of a revolution with immense public and personal consequences: the doubling of the human life span.

The Mapmaker and the Ghost

Author: Sarvenaz Tash
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802723411
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Goldenrod Moram loves adventure, especially when it comes in the form of mapmaking. An avid fan of the legendary explorers Lewis and Clark, she decides to start her own exploring team, the Legendary Adventurers, and to spend her summer vacation discovering the unmapped forest right behind her home. This simple task is complicated by a series of unique events-a chance encounter with a mysterious old lady has her searching for a legendary blue rose. Another, more unfortunate, encounter lands her in the middle of a ragtag bunch of nicknamed ruffians. Throw in the trapped spirit of Meriwether Lewis himself and her well-meaning but nuisance of a little brother, and Goldenrod Moram is in for the quest of a lifetime . . .

The Ghost Network

Author: Catie Disabato
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612194354
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Has the world’s hottest pop star been kidnapped, joined a secret sect, or simply gone into hiding? The answer lies in the abandoned subway stations of Chicago . . . One minute insanely famous pop singer Molly Metropolis is on her way to a major performance in Chicago, and the next, she’s gone. A journalist who’s been covering Molly joins the singer's personal assistant in an increasingly desperate search to find her, guided by a journal left behind in her hotel room, and possible clues hidden in her songs—all of which seem to point to an abandoned line in the Chicago subway system. It leads them to a map of half-completed train lines underneath Chicago, which in turn leads them to the secret, subterranean headquarters of an obscure intellectual sect—and the realization that they’ve gone too far to turn back. And if a superstar can disappear without a trace . . . what can happen to these young women? Suspenseful and wildly original, The Ghost Network is a novel about larger-than-life fantasies—of love, sex, pop music, amateur detective work, and personal reinvention. Debut novelist Catie Disabato bursts on the scene with an ingeniously plotted, witty, haunting mystery.

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump

Author: Sandra Hempel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520250499
Category : Cholera
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
Publisher description

The Invention of Air

Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594488528
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Bestselling author Johnson recounts the story of Joseph Priestley--scientist and theologian, protege of Benjamin Franklin--an 18th-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the U.S.

Ghost Signs

Author: Sam Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780995488694
Category : Advertising, Outdoor
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description

Terra Forma

Author: Frederique Ait-Touati
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046695
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Charting the exploration of an unknown world—our own—with a new cartography of living things rather than space available for conquest or colonization. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travelers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth’s underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.

How We Got to Now

Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 1594633932
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
This book is a celebration of ideas: how they happen and their sometimes unintended results. Johnson shows how simple scientific breakthroughs have driven other discoveries through the network of ideas and innovations that made each finding possible. He traces important inventions through ancient and contemporary history, unlocking tales of unsung heroes and radical revolutions that changed the world and the way we live in it

The Ghost

Author: Arnold Bennett
Publisher:
ISBN: 3963767863
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
First published in 1907, The Ghost was the first of many "fantasias on modern times" written by Arnold Bennett. These illustrated his ability to produce not only realistic novels, perfected in his portrayals of provincial English life set in the Staffordshire scenery of his childhood, but also more sensational stories, written after his move to London where he developed a far more cosmopolitan interest. A supernatural story, The Ghost tells the tale of a beautiful opera star, Rosetta Rosa, whose beauty seems to cast a spell upon all those who meet her. When Carl Foster, a young doctor, sees Rosa at a London opera, and is instantly captivated, he soon finds himself plagued by mysterious happenings, and begins to see a malignant, spectral figure everywhere he turns. When another man enraptured by Rosa mysteriously dies, Carl begins to wonder whether loving her could bring with it a deadly curse. Moving between London and Paris, this fast-paced story draws the reader into a ghostly world of twists, turns, drama, and suspense.