Scribe – serie

Drug-resistant bacteria — known as superbugs — are one of the biggest medical threats of our time. Here, a doctor, researcher, and ethics professor tells the exhilarating story of his race to beat them and save countless lives.When doctor Matt McCarthy first meets Jackson, a mechanic from Queens, it is in the ER, where he has come for treatment for an infected gunshot wound. Usually, antibiotics would be prescribed, but Jackson’s infection is one of a growing number of superbugs, bacteria that have built up resistance to known drugs. He only has one option, and if that doesn’t work he may lose his leg or even his life.On the same day, McCarthy and his mentor Tom Walsh begin work on a groundbreaking clinical trial for a new antibiotic they believe will eradicate certain kinds of superbugs and demonstrate to Big Pharma that investment in these drugs can save millions of lives and prove financially viable. But there are seemingly endless hoops to jump through before they can begin administering the drug to patients, and for people like Jackson time is in short supply.Superbugs is a compelling tale of medical ingenuity. From the muddy trenches of the First World War, where Alexander Fleming searched for a cure for soldiers with infected wounds, to breakthroughs in antibiotics and antifungals today that could revolutionise how infections are treated, McCarthy takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the history — and future — of medicine. Along the way, we meet patients like Remy, a teenage girl with a dangerous and rare infection; Donny, a retired firefighter with a compromised immune system; and Bill, the author’s own father-in-law, who contracts a deadly staph infection. And we learn about the ethics of medical research: why potentially life-saving treatments are often delayed for years to protect patients from exploitation.Can McCarthy get his trial approved and underway in time to save the lives of his countless patients infected with deadly bacteria, who have otherwise lost all hope?

An unputdownable tale of one man’s quest to recover his family’s property, plundered by the Nazis.Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as ‘The Killer’ who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family’s complex history.Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living?Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance — material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Death. Sex. Money. Tricky subjects we’re taught to avoid in polite conversation. Here, the host of a hit podcast reveals how to talk about difficult things, and why it might be the most important thing we do.In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale takes her quest for more honest communication into her own life. She considers her history of facing (and sometimes avoiding) difficult subjects; she reflects on race, wealth, inequality, love, grief, death, power — all the things that shape our daily lives, the things we should be talking about, but often struggle to. Through the personal stories of people whose lives have been transformed by tough conversations, we discover new ways of approaching these tricky topics with family, friends, loved ones, and strangers.Let’s Talk About Hard Things is candid, unflinching, and entertaining in its quest to make everyone more comfortable with the uncomfortable realities of life.

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of interlocking essays perfect for this political moment.With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, New York Times–bestselling author Thomas Frank takes us on a tour through present-day America, showing us a society in the late stages of disintegration.Holding nothing back, Frank skewers both the right and left, and rages about the systematic inequality that led, in 2016, to millions of anxious, ordinary people rallying to the presidential campaign of a billionaire who meant them no good.For those who despair of the future of America and of reason itself, Rendezvous with Oblivion is a booster shot of energy, reality, and moral outrage.

Adult life is full of mysteries. What should you check before renting a flat?How do you ask for a pay rise?Does anything really need to be dry cleaned? And why does everyone else seem to know these things except you? (They don’t, but this book will help.)Being an Adult is a practical and entertaining guide to the life skills you didn’t learn at school. If you've ever wondered when you’re going to become a ‘real’ grown-up, this book will give you the answers you need.

We grant men a right to solitude. Why can’t we do the same for women?Ivory Frame arrives in Paris at the height of the surrealist movement. She falls in with a set of bohemian artists and begins an intense love affair with a volatile, married Russian painter. But this freedom cannot last forever. When the Second World War comes, she is forced to flee, leaving everything she cares about behind.Years later, as Ivory compiles her last, greatest work — a vast account of animal languages — she receives unexpected news. She is told that she has a grandchild, despite never having had a child of her own.Inspired by the life of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, this is a thrillingly elegant yet raw evocation of a woman clawing her way to a creative life.

‘The cold reality of my gender was dawning on me. It was motherhood that forced me to understand the timeless horror of our position. The reason women had not written novels or commanded armies or banked or doctored or explored or painted at the same rate as men. The cause was not, as I had been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: We had been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.’After her first book was published to acclaim, journalist Megan K. Stack got pregnant and quit her job to write. She pictured herself pen in hand while the baby napped, but instead found herself traumatised by a difficult birth and shell-shocked by the start of motherhood.Living abroad provided her with access to affordable domestic labour, and, sure enough, hiring a nanny gave her back the ability to work. At first, Megan thought she had little in common with the women she hired. They were important to her because they made her free. She wanted them to be happy, but she didn’t want to know the details of their lives. That didn’t work for long.When Pooja, an Indian nanny who had been absorbed into the family, disappeared one night with no explanation, Megan was forced to confront the truth: these women were not replaceable, and her life had become inextricably intertwined with theirs. She set off on a journey to find out where they really came from and to understand the global and personal implications of wages paid, services received, and emotional boundaries drawn in the home. As she writes herself: ‘Somebody should investigate. Somebody should write about all of this. But this is my life. If I investigate, I must stand for examination. If I interrogate, I’ll be the one who has to answer.’

A brilliantly evocative memoir from the golden age of newspaper publishing, from a man who helped define our modern media. Les Hinton worked with Rupert Murdoch for more than five decades, and in that time witnessed the transformation of our media landscape. From copy boy at Murdoch’s first paper to senior executive at News Corp, his stories about Clinton and Blair, Brown and Cameron, Princess Diana, Johnny Rotten, phone-hacking, and the man himself, Rupert Murdoch, are as insightful as they are revolutionary. This is one of the defining media memoirs of our age.

In the attention economy, online influencers are an emerging class of power brokers. How can you harness their potential?Break the Internet takes a deep dive into the influencer industry, tracing its evolution from blogging and legacy social media such as Tumblr to today’s world in which YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok dominate. Digital strategist Olivia Yallop goes undercover amongst content creators to understand how online personas are built, uncovering what it is really like to live a branded life and trade in a ‘social stock market’. The result is an insider account of a trend that is set to dominate our future — experts estimate that the economy of influence will be valued at $24 billion globally by 2025.

COVID-19 was the dystopian nightmare pandemic experts warned us about. How do we stop it from ever happening again?COVID-19 catapulted us into a science-fiction scenario: seemingly overnight, literally billions of people around the globe had their lives upended by fear, uncertainty, bankruptcy, illness, or death. It killed millions of people, and cost the global economy trillions of dollars.An outbreak of a new, deadly, highly contagious virus was inevitable. But an explosive global pandemic was not. There is hope, and as this book explains, a pandemic-free world is possible.In The End of Epidemics, leading public health authority Dr Jonathan D. Quick tells the stories of the heroes, past and present, who have succeeded in their fights to stop the spread of illness and death. He explains the science and the politics of combatting epidemics. And he provides a detailed seven-part plan showing exactly how world leaders, health professionals, the business community, media, and ordinary citizens can work together to prevent epidemics, saving millions of lives and safeguarding our future.

An expert guide to the new health trend that is helping people around the world feel more energised and less stressed.Saved by the Siesta explains how siestas work and the remarkable role they can play in overcoming the destructive effects that a shortage of sleep can have on the brain and the body.A daytime nap fulfils all the same functions as a night’s sleep — it’s hormonal, purifying, curative, consolidating, and reinvigorating. It also helps us to combat sleepiness, pain, depression, weak immunity, stress, hypertension, excess weight, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.But to take advantage of all this we need to be aware of the siesta’s subtleties: its various types; the correct body position to adopt; the times that are conducive to sleeping; the most effective duration; the stages of sleep that heighten awareness, cognitive performance, memory, and creativity; and how to get to sleep quickly and wake up without feeling sleepy.Saved by the Siesta provides all this information, and more. It is a lucid and accessible synthesis of the science of sleep, and a practical guide to the benefits of napping.

King David spies on beautiful Bathsheba as she bathes and his desire drives him to acts of such callousness that even his god turns away from him. Only through searching penitence and the psalms that express this can he find him way back into the light.A world and centuries away, King Henry VIII looks up at his prized tapestries of David and Bathsheba and sees in David a mighty predecessor, defender of the faith.Henry’s courtier-poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, sees instead two kings who take what they want, careless of the lives they destroy in the process — David’s lust led him to murder, while Henry is ruthless in his pursuit of Ann Boleyn and the son she has promised him … more ruthless still when she fails to provide an heir.Wyatt too, once dangerously close to Ann himself, is caught in the slipstream of wilful power. David’s psalms of penitence reach across the years to touch and speak to him directly. Shackled in a cell in the Tower of London, not expecting to get out alive, he thinks of his beloved falcon Lukkes, and wishes he too could fly.Lux weaves past and present into a story of love and its reach, fidelity and faith, power and poetry, for readers of Marilynne Robinson, Anne Carson, and Hilary Mantel.

You only have yourself to blame, you might say, but that’s not true. Some decisions take you down one path, and others another … It’s all about power.Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family.After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

From award-winning author Ariel Sabar comes the gripping, true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that engulfed Harvard University.In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery. She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus — ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’, as she titled it — in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene ‘my wife’. Her announcement made international headlines. If early Christians believed that Jesus was married, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world’s predominant faith, threatening not just the celibate, all-male priesthood but sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women’s leadership. As debates over the manuscript’s authenticity raged, award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: where did this tiny scrap of papyrus come from? His indefatigable search for answers became an international true-crime story, in which, remarkably, he managed to solve the crime.

We are constantly being told that globalisation is good for the economy and good for us, but it’s actually the opposite, argues bestselling author Jeff Rubin in this provocative, timely book.In the pre-coronavirus world, governments and economists bragged that GDP was growing and unemployment was down. But even then, real wages had been stagnant for decades, union membership had collapsed, and full-time employment no longer guaranteed you could pay the bills. When we emerge from the virus, it would be nice to think that living in a country that’s getting richer means that you’re getting richer too, but that’s not the way it works anymore. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit only the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the ‘expendable’ middle class. The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous.

An avowed republican investigates the unexpected durability and potential benefits of constitutional monarchies.When he was deposed in Egypt in 1952, King Farouk predicted that there would be five monarchs left at the end of the century: the kings of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, and England. To date, his prediction has proved wrong, and while the twentieth century saw the collapse of monarchies across Europe, many democratic societies have retained them.God Save the Queen is the first book to look at constitutional monarchies globally, and is particularly relevant given the pro-democracy movement in Thailand and recent scandals around the British and Spanish royal families. Is monarchy merely a feudal relic that should be abolished, or does the division between ceremonial and actual power act as a brake on authoritarian politicians? And what is the role of monarchy in the independent countries of the Commonwealth that have retained the Queen as head of state?This book suggests that monarchy deserves neither the adulation of the right nor the dismissal of the left. In an era of autocratic populism, does constitutional monarchy provide some safeguards against the megalomania of political leaders? Is a President Boris potentially more dangerous than a Prime Minister Boris?

What are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety? Jon Fasman journeys from the US to London — one of the most heavily surveilled cities on earth — to China and beyond, to expose the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the state uses surveillance technology.Automatic licence-plate readers allow police to amass a granular record of where people go, when, and for how long. Drones give the state eyes — and possibly weapons — in the skies. Algorithms purport to predict where and when crime will occur, and how big a risk a suspect has of reoffending. Specially designed tools can crack a device’s encryption keys, rending all privacy protections useless. And facial recognition technology poses perhaps a more dire and lasting threat than any other form of surveillance. Jon Fasman examines how these technologies help police do their jobs, and what their use means for our privacy rights and civil liberties, exploring vital questions, such as: Should we expect to be tracked and filmed whenever we leave our homes? Should the state have access to all of the data we generate? Should private companies? What might happen if all of these technologies are combined and put in the hands of a government with scant regard for its citizens’ civil liberties?Through on-the-ground reporting and vivid storytelling, Fasman explores one of the most urgent issues of our time.

Learn how to strengthen your immune system, for life.Our immune system is our body’s fortress — without it, we would be vulnerable to all sorts of infections and diseases. Yet misinformation about how to boost the immune system is everywhere. In Immune, Dr Servaas Bingé breaks through those myths, translating the latest scientific findings on immunity into clear advice with which you can optimise your lifestyle.Using no-nonsense language with a touch of humour and lots of creative thinking, Bingé takes us on a fascinating journey through our immune system. He explains how we become ill and how best to protect against it, providing superb guidance for the most important thing you can do — stay healthy.

A game-changing book about the revolutionary potential of working from home, by two experts who work — and live — together.Out of Office is a book for every office worker — from employees to managers — navigating the return to the office since the outbreak of COVID-19. The lockdowns of 2020–21 have shown us a new path forward, one that doesn’t involve hellish daily commutes and set schedules that no longer make sense. But how can we realise that future in a way that benefits workers and companies alike?Using groundbreaking reporting and interviews with workers and managers around the world, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen illuminate the key values that should be driving this conversation: trust, fairness, flexibility, inclusive workplaces, equity, and work–life balance. Above all, they argue that companies need to listen to their employees — and that this will promote, rather than impede, productivity and profitability. Out of Office is about so much more than Zoom meetings and hybrid schedules: it aims to reshape our entire relationship to the office.

An unlikely political star tells us how Washington really works — and really doesn’t.As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and become a teacher. Early motherhood seemed to put that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington to help Congress rewrite the bankruptcy laws?So began an unsentimental education in the bare-knuckled ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years, and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis, but became a target of the big banks. She tried to protect consumers from predatory bankers, but was thwarted. Finally, at 62, she decided to run for the Senate, and won. In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she fights tooth and nail for the middle class — and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better.