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.

The pandemic unleashed a strange half-world - not the comfortably familiar one we all knew and loved, but one in which we had to tread carefully and remain vigilant. Subsequently, it became a game of risk management that created tensions between the political desire to return to some form of normality and the need to protect lives. Inevitably, this conflict of interests led to confusion, confrontation and, sadly, deaths. Despite some catastrophic misjudgements at the governmental level, we ourselves must also shoulder some of the blame. Social media added fuel to the fire for those who chose to challenge the official guidance as an infringement on their personal freedoms and rights and preferred to interpret events as evidence of institutional conspiracies. Amid this mayhem, our planet was suffering. It was estimated that one million of our eight million species on Earth are threatened with extinction – some within decades. A report by WWF and the Zoological Society of London revealed that animal populations globally had plunged by 68% in more than twenty thousand populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish in the last fifty years.

Brief Candles (1930), Aldous Huxley's fifth collection of short fiction, consists of the following four short stories: "Chawdron" "The Rest Cure" "The Claxtons" "After the Fireworks" Brief Candles takes its title from a line in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost.

In his Introduction to this beautifully curated collection of essays, Steven Johnson heralds the arrival of a new generation of technology writing. Whether it is Nicholas Carr worrying that Google is making us stupid, Dana Goodyear chronicling the rise of the cellphone novel, Andrew Sullivan explaining the rewards of blogging, Dalton Conley lamenting the sprawling nature of work in the information age, or Clay Shirky marveling at the 'cognitive surplus' unleashed by the decline of the TV sitcom, this new generation does not waste time speculating about the future. Its attitude seems to be: Who needs the future? The present is plenty interesting on its own. Packed with sparkling essays culled from print and online publications, The Best Technology Writing 2009 announces a fresh brand of technology journalism, deeply immersed in the fascinating complexity of digital life.

Exploration of changing human nutrition from evolutionary and social perspectives and its influence on health and disease, past and present.

This classic novel of a perfectly engineered society is “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the twentieth century” (The Wall Street Journal). Half a millennium from now, in the World State, the watchword is that every one belongs to every one else. No matter what class of human you are bred to be—from the intellectual Alphas to the Epsilons who provide the manual labor—you are a part of the efficient, well-oiled whole. You are nourished, secure, and blissfully serene thanks to the freely distributed drug called soma. And while sex is strongly encouraged, the old way of procreation is forbidden, eliminating even the pains of childbirth. But when a man and woman journey beyond these confines to where the “savages” reside, and bring back two outsiders, the cracks begin to show. Named as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, Brave New World is one of the first truly dystopian novels. Influenced by the historic events of Huxley’s era yet as relevant today as ever, it is a remarkable depiction of the conflict between progress and the human spirit. “Chilling. . . . That he gave us the dark side of genetic engineering in 1932 is amazing.” —Providence Journal-Bulletin “It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” —The New York Times Book Review