This book examines diseases and disasters from the perspective of social and political theory, exploring the ways in which political leaders, social activists, historians, philosophers, and writers have tried to make sense of the catastrophes that have plagued humankind from Thucydides to the present COVID pandemic. By adopting the perspective of political theory, it sheds light on what these individuals and events can teach us about politics, society, and human nature, as well as the insights and limitations of political theory. Including thinkers such as Thucydides, Sophocles, Augustine, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Publius, Bartolomé de las Casas, Jane Addams, Camus, Saramago, Baudrillard, Weber, Schmitt, Voegelin and Agamben, it considers a diverse range of events including the plagues of Byzantium and 14th century Europe, 9/11, the hurricanes of Fukushima, Boxing Day, and New Orleans, and the current COVID pandemic. An examination of past, present, and future diseases and disasters, and the ways in which individuals and societies react to them, this volume will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy with interests in disaster and the social body.

Disaster medicine is a broad and dynamic field that encompasses the medical and surgical response to mass casualty incidents including rail, air, and road traffic accidents; domestic terrorism; and pandemic outbreaks. It also encompasses the global issues of conflict and natural catastrophe. Specialists in disaster medicine provide insight, guidance, and expertise on the principles and practice of medicine both in the disaster impact area and healthcare evacuation-receiving facilities. They liaise with emergency management professionals, hospitals, healthcare facilities, communities, and governments. With contributions by international authorities in the field, Making Sense of Disaster Medicine: A Hands-on Guide for Medics is an accessible text designed for all medical students and professionals who may find themselves responding to such incidents. Part of the highly successful Making Sense series, the book features an easy-to-read layout and boxed sections with "learning points," "thinking points," "pearls of wisdom," and "hazards." Each chapter concludes with a summary and list of key resources and case studies further enhance the text.

"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Dull Disasters? shows how countries and their partners can better prepare for natural disasters such as typhoons, earthquakes, floods, and drought. By harnessing lessons from finance, political science, economics, psychology, and the naturalsciences, it is possible for governments, civil society, private firms, and international organizations to work together to achieve better preparedness, thereby reducing the risks to people and economies and enablingquicker recoveries. In this way, responses to disasters become less emotional, less political, less headline-grabbing, and more business as usual and effective.

This book presents a decade of advances in the psychological, biological and social responses to disasters, helping medics and leaders prepare and react.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.