Download or read book The Great Smog of India written by Siddharth Singh and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Air pollution kills over a million Indians every year, albeit silently. Families are thrown into a spiralling cycle of hospital visits, critically poor health and financial trouble impacting their productivity and ability to participate in the economy. Children born in regions of high air pollution are shown to have irreversibly reduced lung function and cognitive abilities that affects their incomes for years to come. They all suffer, silently. The issue is exacerbated every winter, when the Great Smog of India descends and envelops much of northern India. In this period, the health impact from mere breathing is akin to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The crisis is so grave that it warrants emergency health advisories forbidding people from stepping out. And yet, for most of us, life is business as usual. It isn't that the scientific community and policymakers don't know what causes air pollution, or what it will take to tackle the problem. It is that the problem is social and political as much as it is technological, and human problems are often harder to overcome than scientific ones. Each sector of the economy that needs reform has its underlying political, economic and social dynamics that need to be addressed to make a credible impact on emissions. With clarity and compelling arguments, and with a dash of irony, Siddharth Singh demystifies the issue: where we are, how we got here, and what we can do now. He discusses not only developments in sectors like transport, industry and energy production that silently contribute to air pollution, but also the 'agricultural shock' to air quality triggered by crop burning in northern India every winter. He places the air pollution crisis in the context of India's meteorological conditions and also climate change. Above all, and most alarmingly, he makes clear what the repercussions will be if we remain apathetic.
Download or read book The Great Smog of India written by and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book London Fog written by Christine L. Corton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Telegraph Editor’s Choice An Evening Standard “Best Books about London” Selection In popular imagination, London is a city of fog. The classic London fogs, the thick yellow “pea-soupers,” were born in the industrial age of the early nineteenth century. Christine L. Corton tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and their lasting effects on our culture and imagination. “Engrossing and magnificently researched...Corton’s book combines meticulous social history with a wealth of eccentric detail. Thus we learn that London’s ubiquitous plane trees were chosen for their shiny, fog-resistant foliage. And since Jack the Ripper actually went out to stalk his victims on fog-free nights, filmmakers had to fake the sort of dank, smoke-wreathed London scenes audiences craved. It’s discoveries like these that make reading London Fog such an unusual, enthralling and enlightening experience.” —Miranda Seymour, New York Times Book Review “Corton, clad in an overcoat, with a linklighter before her, takes us into the gloomier, long 19th century, where she revels in its Gothic grasp. Beautifully illustrated, London Fog delves fascinatingly into that swirling miasma.” —Philip Hoare, New Statesman
Download or read book The Great Smog of China written by Anna L. Ahlers and published by Association for Asian Studies. This book was released on 2020-08 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Smog of China traces Chinese air pollution events dating back to more than 2,000 years ago. Based on the authors' fieldwork, interviews and text studies, the book offers a short and concise history of selected air pollution incidents that for varying reasons prompted different kinds of responses and forms of engagement in Chinese society. The three authors, from the disciplines of anthropology, China studies and political science, identify traceable incidents of smog and air pollution that have been communicated in different media and came to impact society in various ways. This also informs a discussion of what it takes to transform people's experiences of health and environmentally related risks of pollution into broader forms of socio-political agency.
Download or read book India Calling written by Anand Giridharadas and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reversing his parents immigrant path, a young writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new. Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, Were all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, youre going this way. Giridharadas was...
Download or read book The Invisible Killer written by Gary Fuller and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent examination of one of the biggest global crises facing us today--air pollution--looking at the drastic worsening of the problem, and what we can do about it. "Fascinating, readable, and terrifying in equal measure." —Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees The air pollution that we breathe every day is largely invisible—but it is killing us. How did it get this bad, and how can we stop it? Far from a modern-day problem, scientists were aware of the impact of air pollution as far back as the seventeenth century. Now, as more of us live in cities, we are closer than ever to pollution sources, and the detrimental impact on the environment and our health has reached crisis point. The Invisible Killer will introduce you to the incredible individuals whose groundbreaking research paved the way to today's understanding of air pollution, often at their own detriment. Gary Fuller's global story examines devastating incidents from London's Great Smog to Norway's acid rain; Los Angeles's traffic problem to wood-burning damage in New Zealand. Fuller argues that the only way to alter the future course of our planet and improve collective global health is for city and national governments to stop ignoring evidence and take action, persuading the public and making polluters bear the full cost of the harm that they do. The decisions that we make today will impact on our health for decades to come. The Invisible Killer is an essential book for our times and a cautionary tale we need to take heed of.
Download or read book Air written by Dean Spears and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India's air pollution is a deadly threat. Will its politics meet the challenge?Exposure to the world's worst air pollution kills over a million Indians each year. It also affects children's growth and threatens the economy and health of the next generation. No family can save itself from the collective danger of pollution. That is the task of governments, which, instead, have enacted showy, ineffective policies while neglecting to even measure the problem. With a smart package of policies, India could have healthier air. In fact, some strategies could bring down air pollution today, while also reducing the country's deep vulnerability to future climate change. But to do so would demand an honest reckoning with both challenges: particles in the air and rising temperatures. India's children need a serious commitment to change -- not empty reassurance. The environment and economic progress are often portrayed to be at odds, but the compelling stories and hard facts in this important book challenge that outdated, narrow debate. It is time to clear the air..
Download or read book Difficult Loves written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1984 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a collection of stories written during the 1940s and 1950s, the author captures moments of revelation in the lives of ordinary people, instants blending recognition and alarm as deceptions and illusions are laid bare.
Download or read book Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-03-08 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental engineers support the well-being of people and the planet in areas where the two intersect. Over the decades the field has improved countless lives through innovative systems for delivering water, treating waste, and preventing and remediating pollution in air, water, and soil. These achievements are a testament to the multidisciplinary, pragmatic, systems-oriented approach that characterizes environmental engineering. Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges outlines the crucial role for environmental engineers in this period of dramatic growth and change. The report identifies five pressing challenges of the 21st century that environmental engineers are uniquely poised to help advance: sustainably supply food, water, and energy; curb climate change and adapt to its impacts; design a future without pollution and waste; create efficient, healthy, resilient cities; and foster informed decisions and actions.
Download or read book Waste of a Nation written by Assa Doron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India, you can still find the kabaadiwala, the rag-and-bone man. He wanders from house to house buying old newspapers, broken utensils, plastic bottles—anything for which he can get a little cash. This custom persists and recreates itself alongside the new economies and ecologies of consumer capitalism. Waste of a Nation offers an anthropological and historical account of India’s complex relationship with garbage. Countries around the world struggle to achieve sustainable futures. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey argue that in India the removal of waste and efforts to reuse it also lay waste to the lives of human beings. At the bottom of the pyramid, people who work with waste are injured and stigmatized as they deal with sewage, toxic chemicals, and rotting garbage. Terrifying events, such as atmospheric pollution and childhood stunting, that touch even the wealthy and powerful may lead to substantial changes in practices and attitudes toward sanitation. And innovative technology along with more effective local government may bring about limited improvements. But if a clean new India is to emerge as a model for other parts of the world, a “binding morality” that reaches beyond the current environmental crisis will be required. Empathy for marginalized underclasses—Dalits, poor Muslims, landless migrants—who live, almost invisibly, amid waste produced predominantly for the comfort of the better-off will be the critical element in India’s relationship with waste. Solutions will arise at the intersection of the traditional and the cutting edge, policy and practice, science and spirituality.
Download or read book Death in the Air written by Kate Winkler Dawson and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.
Download or read book Leila written by Prayaag Akbar and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side.But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.There are thirty-two candle stubs buried in that lawn, and Shalini believes her search is finally drawing to a close. When she finds Leila, she will return and dig up each and every one.
Download or read book Urban Climates written by T. R. Oke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Climates is the first full synthesis of modern scientific and applied research on urban climates. The book begins with an outline of what constitutes an urban ecosystem. It develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs. It explains the physical principles governing the creation of distinct urban climates, such as airflow around buildings, the heat island, precipitation modification and air pollution, and it then illustrates how this knowledge can be applied to moderate the undesirable consequences of urban development and help create more sustainable and resilient cities. With urban climate science now a fully-fledged field, this timely book fulfills the need to bring together the disparate parts of climate research on cities into a coherent framework. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in fields such as climatology, urban hydrology, air quality, environmental engineering and urban design.
Download or read book Queen Sugar written by Natalie Baszile and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the acclaimed OWN TV series produced by Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay "Queen Sugar is a page-turning, heart-breaking novel of the new south, where the past is never truly past, but the future is a hot, bright promise. This is a story of family and the healing power of our connections—to each other, and to the rich land beneath our feet." —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Readers, booksellers, and critics alike are embracing Queen Sugar and cheering for its heroine, Charley Bordelon, an African American woman and single mother struggling to build a new life amid the complexities of the contemporary South. When Charley unexpectedly inherits eight hundred acres of sugarcane land, she and her eleven-year-old daughter say goodbye to smoggy Los Angeles and head to Louisiana. She soon learns, however, that cane farming is always going to be a white man’s business. As the sweltering summer unfolds, Charley struggles to balance the overwhelming challenges of a farm in decline with the demands of family and the startling desires of her own heart.
Download or read book The Writer and the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding. ‘All [of these essays] are worth reading (and rereading), both for the contemporary and historical information and insight they artfully impart and for what they tell us about a uniquely complex writer’ Spectator
Download or read book Second Suns Two Trailblazing Doctors and Their Quest to Cure Blindness One Pair of Eyes at a Time written by David Oliver Relin and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback: a #1 New York Times–bestselling author’s gripping chronicle of “two doctors . . . bringing light to those in darkness” (Time) Second Suns is the unforgettable true story of two very different doctors with a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness. Dr. Geoffrey Tabin was the high-achieving “bad boy” of his class at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sanduk Ruit grew up in a remote village in the Himalayas, where cataract blindness—easily curable in modern hospitals—amounts to an epidemic. Together, they pioneered a new surgical method, by which they have restored sight to over 100,000 people—all for about $20 per operation. Master storyteller David Oliver Relin brings the doctors’ work to vivid life through poignant portraits of their patients, from old men who can once again walk treacherous mountain trails, to children who can finally see their mothers’ faces. The Himalayan Cataract Project is changing the world—one pair of eyes at a time.
Download or read book Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line written by Deepa Anappara and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) debut novel that “announces the arrival of a literary supernova” (The New York Times Book Review),“a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma). WINNER OF THE EDGAR® AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Library Journal In a sprawling Indian city, a boy ventures into its most dangerous corners to find his missing classmate. . . . Through market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world. Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit. But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again. Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.
