Like a cool drink on a summer day, "Hope When the World Shut Down" offers an oasis of hope from a world that often leaves us parched and exhausted. A compilation of short stories from believers in all walks of life, these snapshots, written during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, will leave you laughing and crying as you read how ordinary people held onto God's promises. You'll be sure to identify with these easy-to-read stories by doctors, educators, students, ministers, homemakers and grandparents, packed with uplifting Scripture. Whether reading it as a daily devotional or all in one sitting, you will come away refreshed, feeling like you just spent an evening with an old friend.

Like a cool drink on a summer day, “Hope When the World Shut Down” offers an oasis of hope from a world that often leaves us parched and exhausted. A compilation of short stories from believers in all walks of life, these snapshots, written during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, will leave you laughing and crying as you read how ordinary people held onto God’s promises. You’ll be sure to identify with these easy-to-read stories by doctors, educators, students, ministers, homemakers and grandparents, packed with uplifting Scripture. Whether reading it as a daily devotional or all in one sitting, you will come away refreshed, feeling like you just spent an evening with an old friend.

Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even The Lord of the Rings, renowned thought leader Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, has examined the threats to our future security—predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called The Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today, just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically—too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent and more authoritarian. In his latest work (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.

Everyone is struggling to come to terms with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all asking the same questions: How should we respond? How do we move forward from here? How can we regain our motivations or ambitions? Coronavirus Collective is a series of short stories and messages of love, life, and hope compiled by the hosts of the Last Life Ever podcast, that seeks to help us all find the answers to the biggest question of all: "Where do we go from here?" Twenty-five different authors, from all walks of life, share their struggles, triumphs, and reflections on life from the heart of the pandemic. Written in the first few weeks of the global shut down, the authors share their unique perspectives on how they see the world through the lens of the coronavirus. Coronavirus Collective will lift readers up, help them to cope with uncertainty, find encouragement, take action, sleep better, cook better meals, and ultimately find peace in uncertain times. With strength and spirit, we can win the fight.

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.

"This book’s great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis."—Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review "Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed. The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death. Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that. Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.

The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.