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Author: Richard A. Posner Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195346394 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.
Author: Richard A. Posner Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195346394 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.
Author: David Keys Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0345444361 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge. In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago. The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave. Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland. In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.
Author: Jennifer Cazenave Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 1438474768 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann’s twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film. “Cazenave’s immense work of scholarship and reflection offers an intimate and exacting account of the way Lanzmann’s approach to the project shifted and changed over the years of its creation. Never before has there been a more insightful study of the evolution of his thinking. I believe that any scholar who has worked on this film will agree.” — Stuart Liebman, editor of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays “This monumental book will profoundly change our understanding of Shoah and Lanzmann’s highly influential shaping of the Holocaust narrative. Cazenave reveals that the significance of Shoah is not only found in what is in it, but, perhaps more importantly, what was omitted from it.” — Aaron Kerner, author of Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films
Author: Robert Muir-Wood Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465096476 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.
Author: Ann Marie Stephens Publisher: Astra Publishing House ISBN: 1635924677 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 39
Book Description
Nine kittens go on an exciting boating adventure that's a (funny) CATastrophe in this playful picture book that demonstrates the key math concept of patterns. A crew of hungry kittens and their captain head to the lake to catch some dinner, but the fish have surprises in store for them. Physics is at work too. What happens when confused kitties paddle every which way? Or when they all lean in the same direction? A pattern is needed to avoid a catastrophe! Patterns are the foundation on which math is built. Using strong rhythm, clever wordplay, and countable characters, CATastrophe! is a fun read-aloud that also shows what patterns can do. Helpful backmatter will deepen readers' understanding and challenge them to find more patterns in this book and in our world.
Author: Eva Horn Publisher: ISBN: 9780231188623 Category : Disaster films Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
The Future as Catastrophe offers a novel critique of the fascination with disaster. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its historical roots to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Eva Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned.
Author: Elizabeth Kolbert Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1620409895 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
A new edition of the book that launched Elizabeth Kolbert's career as an environmental writer--updated with three new chapters, making it, yet again, "irreplaceable" (Boston Globe). Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. But in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career. She has added a chapter bringing things up-to-date on the existing text, plus three new chapters--on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again, a must-read for our moment.
Author: Christopher Dole Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317013867 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
If catastrophes are, by definition, exceptional events of such magnitude that worlds and lives are dramatically overturned, the question of timing would pose a seemingly straightforward, if not redundant question. The Time of Catastrophe demonstrates the analytic productiveness of this question, arguing that there is much to be gained by interrogating the temporal conceits of conventional understandings of catastrophe and the catastrophic. Bringing together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars, the book develops a critical language for examining 'catastrophic time', recognizing the central importance of, and offering a set of frameworks for, examining the alluring and elusive qualities of catastrophe. Framed around the ideas of Agamben, Kant and Benjamin, and drawing on philosophy, history, law, political science, anthropology and the arts, this volume seeks to demonstrate how the question of 'catastrophic time' is in fact a question about something much more than the frequency of disasters in our so-called 'Age of Catastrophe'.
Author: Merrill Wyatt Publisher: Jimmy Patterson ISBN: 0316471577 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
In this tantalizing mystery that's "filled with laugh out loud moments" and "reads like a middle-grade version of the movie Clue", Ernestine is the smart, spunky, and fearless Nancy Drew for today's young readers! We all know and love Ramona, Matilda, and Harriet the Spy. Now meet Ernestine. When a series of suspicious accidents befalls the wealthy residents of the retired artists' home where she works, Ernestine is determined to piece together clues to find the real culprit. She suspects it might be a zombie, but maybe greedy relatives can be just as scary! Catastrophe has never been so much fun!
Author: Richard A. Posner
Author: Richard A. Posner
Author: David Keys
Author: Jennifer Cazenave
Author: Robert Muir-Wood
Author: Ann Marie Stephens
Author: Eva Horn
Author: Allison Gilbert
Author: Elizabeth Kolbert
Author: Christopher Dole
Author: Merrill Wyatt