Geoff Manaugh – författare

At the heart of Geoff Manaugh's A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: the city as seen through the eyes of robbers. From experts on both sides of the law, readers learn to understand the city as an arena of possible tunnels and picked locks and architecture itself as an obstacle to be outwitted and second-guessed. From how to pick locks (and the tools required) to how to case a bank on the edge of town, readers will learn to detect the vulnerabilities, blind spots, and unseen openings that surround us all the time. This simultaneously allows us to view the city from specific buildings and individual rooms to whole neighbourhoods through the privileged eyes of FBI investigating agents and security consultants, people dedicated both to solving and to preempting these attempts at devious entry. Full of absurd and marvelous stories of heists and capers, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers a kind of criminal X-ray of our built environment. Never again will readers enter a bank without imagining the vault geometry, or visit a museum without plotting ways to bring their favourite painting home with them.

The past, present, and future of an idea whose time has clearly come: Quarantine ...

'Manaugh and Twilley shed illuminating light on a phenomenon that seems utterly of the present moment.' Financial Times’ Best Books of the Year'Startlingly timely, authoritatively researched, and electrifyingly written.' Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of NeurodiversityQuarantine has shaped our world, yet it remains both feared and misunderstood. It is our most powerful response to uncertainty, but it operates through an assumption of guilt: in quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. An unusually poetic metaphor for moral and mythic ills, quarantine means waiting to see if something hidden inside of us will be revealed. Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space – from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt the widespread quarantine imposed by Covid-19 before the next pandemic hits through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley drop deep into the Earth to tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, strip down to nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer tasked with saving the Earth from extraterrestrial infections. The result is part travelogue, part intellectual history – a book as compelling as it is definitive, and one that could not be more urgent or timely.