Every aspect of the pandemic was said to be ‘total,’ absolute, and undiscriminating. Its very name implied as much. The virus was everywhere, and a threat to us all. In Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, Michael Lewis identifies three moments within the pandemic that were conceived in such a monolithic way: (1) ‘The Science,’ which had to be unanimous if it was to assume a sovereign role, and to have us ‘follow’ it; (2) ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions,’ which were regarded as the only possible response, without which death and disease would ‘run riot’; and (3) the one sole remedy that could bring about the promised end of the restrictions, to the exclusion of every other conception of medicine, treatment, and care. In each case of seeming universality, dissent immediately identifies you as a friend of the virus. And yet if all of these cases have been revealing their counterproductivity ever since, what are we to make of the elision of alternatives? Is it part of a more general tendency to thrust the questioning of hegemonic notions to the margins of respectable discourse, inhabited solely by the mad, bad, and dangerous to know?

A trenchant look at how the coronavirus reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society As seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS: “A stirring alarm addressed to an unsettled world.” (Kirkus Reviews) Forget the world that came before. The author of American Vertigo serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society. With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has irrevocably altered societies around the world. In this sharp essay, world-renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy interrogates the many meanings and metaphors we have assigned to the pandemic—and what they tell us about ourselves. Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Foucault, Lévy asks uncomfortable questions about reality and mythology: he rejects the idea that the virus is a warning from nature, the inevitable result of global capitalism; he questions the heroic status of doctors, asking us to think critically about the loci of authority and power; he challenges the panicked polarization that dominates online discourse. Lucid, incisive, and always original, Lévy takes a bird’s-eye view of the most consequential historical event of our time and proposes a way to defend human society from threats to our collective future. A portion of the author’s proceeds will be donated to Binc (The Book Industry Charitable Foundation).

This expanded, updated, and completely revised edition of The COVID-19 Catastrophe is the authoritative guide to a global health crisis that has consumed the world. Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal The Lancet, scrutinises the actions taken by governments as they sought to contain the novel coronavirus. He shows that indecision and disregard for scientific evidence has led many political leaders to preside over hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and the worst global economic crisis for three centuries. This new edition provides a systematic discussion of the pandemic’s course, national responses, more transmissible mutant variants of the virus, and the launch of the world’s largest ever vaccination programme. Only now are we beginning to understand the full scale of the COVID-19 crisis. We need to learn the lessons of this pandemic, and we need to learn them fast, because the next pandemic may arrive sooner than we think.

This book examines how legal institutions reify the value of death in the twenty-first century. Its starting point is that bio-technological innovations have extended life to such an extent that death has become an epistemological problem for legal institutions. It explores how legal definitions of death are subject to the governing logic of economisation, how legal technologies for registering a death reshape what kind of deaths are counted during a pandemic, and how technologies for recycling cadaveric tissue problematise the legal status of the corpse. The question that unites each chapter is how legal institutions respond to technologies that bring death before their laws. The book argues for an interdisciplinary approach, informed by the writings of Georges Bataille, Wendy Brown, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, to understand how legal epistemologies are increasingly disrupted, challenged, and countered by technologies that repurpose death to extend, nourish and foster human life. It contends that legal theorists and social scientists need to rethink doctrinal perspectives of law when theorising how law defines the moment of death, shapes what kind of deaths count, and recycles the debris of the dead. This book will appeal to a broad international readership with research interests in critical theory, political theory, legal theory or death studies; and it will be particularly useful for teachers and students who are searching for an accessible entry point to the study of the intersections between law and death.

Why did the world's nations fight the Covid-19 pandemic in such different ways and with such varying results?

The pandemic has encompassed and infested every aspect of our lives – our health, our institutions, our relationships with other countries, our perception of our leaders, our planet and our future. We innocently fell headlong into lockdowns and the ensuing pandemonium unaware of just how pervasively it would shatter the fragility of our daily lifestyles and expose our strengths and weaknesses. The series of 4 books covers not just the immediate catastrophic impact but also the longer-term corollaries of the pandemic. It is not intended to be a ‘specialist’ analysis of just one aspect of the virus but provides a layman’s perspective of the ramifications and interconnections that emanated from the crisis. I began documenting events - in part to fill in the time during our enforced confinement - and have continued recording events for nearly 3 years, as more and more unforeseen facets of the pandemic materialised on an almost daily basis. This particular book concentrates on the immediate impact the virus had on our lives.

AWARD-WINNING VANITY FAIR WRITER Marie Brenner shares a remarkable depiction of New York—a city in crisis—based on new, behind-the-scenes reporting that captures the resilience, peril, and compassion of the early days of the Covid pandemic. In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City. Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. It became apparent that if Covid wasn’t somehow halted, the death count in New York alone would be in the hundreds of thousands. And if New York’s hospitals failed, what chance did the rest of the country have? Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who tried to save lives across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and the northern periphery of the city. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Brenner takes us inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics to provide extraordinary witness to the war as it was waged on the front line. But The Desperate Hours is more than a thrilling account of medicine under extreme pressure. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they loved more than any other.