How To Survive A Crisis, David Omand (paperback June 2024)
£10.99
We never know when a crisis might explode. Some 'sudden impact' events, such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters, blow up out of a clear blue sky.Other 'slow burn' crises smoulder away for years, often with warning signs ignored along the way until, as if from nowhere, the troops storm the palace. In How to Survive a Crisis, Professor Sir David Omand draws on his experience in defence, security and intelligence, including as Director of GCHQ and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, to show how you can detect a looming crisis and extinguish it (or at least survive it with minimum loss). Using gripping real-world examples from Omand's storied career, and drawing lessons from historic catastrophes such as Chernobyl, 9/11, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the WannaCry ransomware cyberattack, this empowering book is filled with practical advice on how to survive the multiplying crises of the future.
Not every crisis need tip into disaster - if we have invested in personal, business and national resilience. This is an essential toolkit for our turbulent twenty-first century, as well as an exhilarating read for anyone interested in the state of our world - and how we might improve it. 'Piercingly insightful, brilliantly lucid and illuminating, frightening and wise .
. . From nuclear meltdown to apocalyptic cyber-attacks, from pandemics to the drums of war, here is a remarkable record of how the threads of society can be held firm in the darkest days' Sinclair McKay, author of Berlin'An amazing book.
Timely, essential and important. The brilliantly insightful David Omand draws on his unmatched experience to explore the complexities of crisis.
You might also like
A Life on Our Planet : My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, David Attenborough ( paperback May 2022)
£12.99
With a new afterword, Why You Are Here: A speech on the opening of the COP26 climate summit.As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity. I have been witness to this decline.A Life on Our Planet contains my witness statement, and my vision for the future - the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. We have the opportunity to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited. All we need is the will do so.
All The Living and The Dead, Hayley Campbell ( paperback Feb 2023)
£8.99
All the Living and the Dead : An Exploration of the People Who Make Death Their Life's Work
In this profoundly moving and remarkable book, journalist Hayley Campbell explores society's attitudes towards death, and the impact on those who work with it every day. 'If the reason we're outsourcing this burden is because it's too much for us,' she asks, 'how do they deal with it?' Would facing death directly make us fear it less?Inspired by her own childhood fascination with the subject, she meets embalmers and a former death row executioner, mass fatality investigators and a bereavement midwife.
She talks to gravediggers who have already dug their own graves and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with people who see death every day, she asks: Does seeing death change you as a person? And are we all missing something vital by letting death remain hidden?
Cacophony of Bone, Kerri Ni Dochartaigh (paperback Jan 2024)
£10.99
Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes.The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked.
For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year - a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life - from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world - and it is about all that does not change.
All that which simply keeps on - living and breathing, nesting and dying - in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean.
Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.
Calypso, Oliver Langmead ( hardback April 2024)
£12.99
A ground-breaking, mind-bending and wildly imaginative epic verse revolution in SF. A saga of colony ships, shattering moons and cataclysmic war in a new Eden. Truly unforgettable and richly lyrical eco-fiction, for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Jeff VanderMeer.
Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint. She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept.
She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth – a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past. And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.
