Download or read book Love and Murder in the Time of Covid written by Qiu Xiaolong and published by Severn House Publishers Ltd. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former chief inspector Chen faces a tricky serial murderer case at the height of the Covid pandemic - and risks everything he has to expose the deadly effects of the Chinese Communist Party's so-called zero Covid policy to the world. Over two million copies of the Inspector Chen series sold worldwide The Covid crisis is at its height in China. Ex-chief inspector Chen Cao is horrified by the way the Chinese Communist Party are using the pandemic as an excuse to put the Chinese people under blanket surveillance and by the soaring number of deaths caused not by Covid, but by the CCP's inhuman 'zero Covid' policy. Chen is debating whether to translate the 'Wuhan File' - a diary of life during the Wuhan disaster smuggled to him by a close friend - and expose the CCP's secrets to the world when to his surprise he is summoned by a high-level party cadre to help investigate a series of murders near a local Shanghai hospital. Under pressure from the Party to reach a quick conclusion and help maintain political stability, Chen investigates, aware that he too has been placed under omnipresent, omnipotent surveillance. And as he works, determined to uncover the truth, no matter what, he risks everything by deciding to translate the Wuhan Files. For one thing is true in China: you must be absolutely loyal to the Party. Otherwise, you are considered absolutely disloyal, and the consequences are dark indeed . . .
Download or read book The End of October written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal). At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution. As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.
Download or read book The Sentence written by Louise Erdrich and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dazzling. . . . A hard-won love letter to readers and to booksellers, as well as a compelling story about how we cope with pain and fear, injustice and illness. One good way is to press a beloved book into another's hands. Read The Sentence and then do just that."—USA Today, Four Stars In this New York Times bestselling novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors. Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
Download or read book Sing Unburied Sing written by Jesmyn Ward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a “tour de force” (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic. Jesmyn Ward’s historic second National Book Award–winner is “perfectly poised for the moment” (The New York Times), an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. “Ward’s writing throbs with life, grief, and love… this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it” (Buzzfeed). Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and “an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and present” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Download or read book Alone Together written by Garth Stein and published by Central Avenue Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Could there be a timelier gift to quarantined readers...? I doubt it."—The Washington Post "A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support."—Kirkus Reviews "Connects writers, readers, and booksellers in a wonderfully imaginative way. It's a really good book for a really good cause"—Bestselling author James Patterson ALONE TOGETHER: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. All contributing authors and business partners are donating their share to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community. The roster of diverse voices includes Faith Adiele, Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Devi S. Laskar, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch. The overarching theme is how this age of isolation and uncertainty is changing us as individuals and a society. "Alone Together showcases the human desire to grieve, explore, comfort, connect, and simply sit with the world as it weathers the pandemic. Jennifer Haupt's timely and moving anthology also benefits the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, making it a project that is noble in both word and deed."—Ann Patchett, Bestselling author, bookseller, and Co-Ambassador for The Book Industry Charitable Foundation
Download or read book The Madness of Crowds written by Louise Penny and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller AARP The Magazine – Recommended Summer Reading CNN – A Most Anticipated Book of August Bustle – A Most Anticipated Book of August Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to Three Pines in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's latest spellbinding novel You’re a coward. Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache. It starts innocently enough. While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request. He’s asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university. While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture. They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson’s views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it’s near impossible to tell them apart. Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold. Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone. When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion. And the madness of crowds.
Download or read book 56 Days written by Catherine Ryan Howard and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Best Thriller of 2021 A Washington Post Best Thriller of 2021 A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year An Amazon Editors’ Pick ''Bloody good.'' —The New York Times ''Timely, surprising, emotionally alive, this is about as good as suspense fiction gets.'' —Washington Post No one even knew they were together. Now one of them is dead. 56 DAYS AGO Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin and start dating the same week COVID-19 reaches Irish shores. 35 DAYS AGO When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests they move in together. Ciara sees a unique opportunity for a relationship to flourish without the scrutiny of family and friends. Oliver sees a chance to hide who—and what—he really is. TODAY Detectives arrive at Oliver’s apartment to discover a decomposing body inside. Can they determine what really happened, or has lockdown created an opportunity for someone to commit the perfect crime?
Download or read book That Good Night written by Sunita Puri and published by Viking. This book was released on 2019 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A ... memoir about how the essential parts of one young woman's early life--her mother's work as a surgeon and her spiritual practice--led her to become a doctor and to question the premise that medicine exists to prolong life at all costs."--
Download or read book The Plague Year written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review 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 woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.
Download or read book Nightmare Scenario written by Yasmeen Abutaleb and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instant #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller From the Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta—the definitive account of the Trump administration’s tragic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the chaos, incompetence, and craven politicization that has led to more than a half million American deaths and counting. Since the day Donald Trump was elected, his critics warned that an unexpected crisis would test the former reality-television host—and they predicted that the president would prove unable to meet the moment. In 2020, that crisis came to pass, with the outcomes more devastating and consequential than anyone dared to imagine. Nightmare Scenario is the complete story of Donald Trump’s handling—and mishandling—of the COVID-19 catastrophe, during the period of January 2020 up to Election Day that year. Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta take us deep inside the White House, from the Situation Room to the Oval Office, to show how the members of the administration launched an all-out war against the health agencies, doctors, and scientific communities, all in their futile attempts to wish away the worst global pandemic in a century. From the initial discovery of this new coronavirus, President Trump refused to take responsibility, disputed the recommendations of his own pandemic task force, claimed the virus would “just disappear,” mocked advocates for safe-health practices, and encouraged his base and the entire GOP to ignore or rescind public health safety measures. Abutaleb and Paletta reveal the numerous times officials tried to dissuade Trump from following his worst impulses as he defied recommendations from the experts and even members of his own administration. And they show how the petty backstabbing and rivalries among cabinet members, staff, and aides created a toxic environment of blame, sycophancy, and political pressure that did profound damage to the public health institutions that Americans needed the most during this time. Even after an outbreak in the fall that swept through the White House and infected Trump himself, he remained defiant in his approach to the virus, very likely costing him his own reelection. Based on exhaustive reporting and hundreds of hours of interviews from inside the disaster zone at all levels of authority, Nightmare Scenario is a riveting account of how the United States government failed its people as never before, a tragedy whose devastating aftershocks will linger and be felt by generations to come.
Download or read book Viral Loads written by Lenore Manderson and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.
Download or read book What Happened to Paula An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood written by Katherine Dykstra and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.
Download or read book COVID 19 written by Dylan Howard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the final days of 2019, a new and deadly virus was quietly spreading through the city of Wuhan, China. Within six months it would kill half a million people worldwide, infect a further 10 million, and change the way all of us live, work and play forever. Now, for the first time, the real story of the greatest global crisis of the age can be told. Reporters Dylan Howard and Dominic Utton, collaborating from New York and London—infection hotspots in what would become two of the worst-hit nations on Earth—have together mapped the rise, spread and impact of the virus . . . and uncovered some explosive revelations. COVID-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History—From Wuhan to the White House delivers the unfettered truth about what is undoubtedly the biggest political scandal of our time. It shows in unprecedented detail how governments in China, the UK, and the US not only failed to protect their citizens from the threat of the disease, but actively conspired to put their own political and economic ideologies above the lives of ordinary people. From early attempts by Beijing to silence any reports of the new virus to the inability of the WHO to act decisively; from warnings received and ignored by President Trump to decisions taken by the UK government that directly led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives; from whispers of military experiments to outlandish 5G conspiracy theories, Howard and Utton separate fact from fiction, science from hysteria, and expose a trail of dead bodies, wilful mismanagement, incompetence, arrogance, deliberate cover-ups, and outrageous lies that raise serious questions about who is really responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed by COVID-19. Through vigorous investigations, dedicated reporting, and exclusive first-person sourcing, COVID-19 unearths a more complex understanding of the rise, spread, and consequences of the first six months of the pandemic than has yet been seen, and exposes shocking revelations about the roles and motivations of the American and British governments in the crisis. The true story of COVID-19 is not just that of a silent killer that suddenly invaded the world . . . it’s the scandal of a global tragedy that could have—and should have—been prevented. The real number of deaths and infections from the virus will never be known. The figures have not only been underreported in China, but by supposedly transparent governments in the West for reasons less connected with public safety and more to do with their own mendacity, incompetence, and corruption. Written with the urgency and tension of a thriller novel but grounded in rigorously factual reporting, COVID-19 is the essential read on the most horrifying scandal of our age.
Download or read book The Fire This Time written by Jesmyn Ward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this ... collection of essays and poems about race from ... voices of her generation and our time"--
Download or read book The Murder Book written by Lissa Marie Redmond and published by Severn House Publishers Ltd. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exciting and atmospheric second entry of this Cold Case Investigation mystery series Detective Lauren Riley is determined to bring the attacker that left her for dead to justice . . . even if it is a fellow police officer. Cold Case Detectives Lauren Riley and her partner Shane Reese are helping the Homicide Squad after a murder earlier in the day left the department short-staffed. As their shift ends, Reese leaves Lauren alone only for her to be savagely beaten and stabbed from behind minutes later. Lauren didn’t see her attacker, but knows it was a fellow police officer from the city-issued boots she glimpsed as she passed out. Stolen during the attack is the Murder Book, which contains evidence on all active cold cases. Without the book, old homicides became almost impossible to track down. Who in police headquarters would try to kill a fellow officer? Why’d they suddenly want the Murder Book? Although hurt and on enforced leave, nothing will stop Lauren from seeking answers . . . but who on the force can she trust and how safe is she within her own home?
Download or read book Who Took Eden Mulligan written by Sharon Dempsey and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘A hugely promising debut’ Irish Independent ‘Gripping and pacy’ Steve Cavanagh, Sunday Times bestselling author of Fifty Fifty ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead. It’s my fault. I killed them.’
Download or read book Liberty or Lockdown written by Jeffrey Tucker and published by American Institute for Economic Research. This book was released on 2020-09-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Tucker is well known as the author of many informative and beloved articles and books on the subject of human freedom. Now he’s turned his attention to the most shocking and widespread violation of human freedom in our times: the authoritarian lockdown of society on the pretense that it is necessary in the face of a novel virus. Learning from the experts, Jeffrey Tucker has researched this subject from every angle. In this book, Tucker lays out the history, politics, economics, and science relevant to the coronavirus response. The result is clear: there is no justification for the lockdowns. It’s liberty or lockdown. We have to choose. The book includes a foreword by George Gilder.
