Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Disaster Relief

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake large enough to knock the earth from its axis sent a massive tsunami speeding toward the Japanese coast and the aging and vulnerable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors. Over the following weeks, the world watched in horror as a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe: fail-safes failed, cooling systems shut down, nuclear rods melted.

A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of Northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,000 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

Two decades ago, British Petroleum, a venerable and storied corporation, was running out of oil reserves. Along came a new CEO of vision and vast ambition, John Browne, who pulled off one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked....

On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle one. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral first-hand account, Katz takes readers inside the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and through the monumental--yet misbegotten--rescue effort that followed.

Paul Collier reveals that 50 failed states - home to the poorest one billion people on earth - pose the central challenge of the developing world in the 21st century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards.

As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived. No one has ever attempted the complete reconstruction of a crash of this magnitude.

The best-selling author presents a heart-pounding account of the world's greatest nuclear disaster, based on sources not available before the fall of the Soviet Union. Read's enthralling account is filled with acts of courage - and also bumbling confusion, secrecy, lies, and coverups. Read spent many months in Russia interviewing hundreds of survivors and experts.

In this ground-breaking book, Ben Ramalingam shows that the linear, mechanistic models and assumptions on which foreign aid is built would be more at home in early-20th-century factory floors than in the dynamic, complex world we face today. All around us, we can see the costs and limitations of dealing economies and societies as if they are analogous to machines. The reality is that such social systems have far more in common with ecosystems: They are complex, dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable.

Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of the Cold War's defining episode. Berlin, 1948: a divided city in a divided country in a divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside Soviet-controlled Eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies were determined to stay but had only three narrow air corridors linking the city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by cutting off food and fuel.

1 Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor - in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair.

Rebecca Solnit untersucht, wie sich der Mensch angesichts der größten Katastrophe verhält, und zeigt, dass uns der Ausnahmezustand in eine vorübergehende Utopie versetzen kann – in Zustände neuer Bewusstheit und sozialer Möglichkeiten. Sie entlarvt die Mythen vom gesellschaftlichen Verfall in Krisenzeiten, wie sie etwa in dem Klassiker »Lord of the Flies« postuliert werden.

Twenty years ago the most common cause of death for medical humanitarians and other aid workers was traffic accidents; today it is violent attacks. And the death of each doctor, nurse, paramedic, midwife, and vaccinator is multiplied untold times in the vulnerable populations deprived of their care. In a 2005 report, the ICRC found that for every soldier killed in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 60 civilians died due to loss of immunizations and other basic health services.

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, writes Jacob Darwin Hamblin, the movement - and its dire predictions - owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture.

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.

Ohne Vorwarnung kam die Flut über das Ahrtal. In der Nacht vom 14. auf den 15. Juli 2021 brach eine Katastrophe über die beschauliche Weinregion herein. Zurück blieben Schlamm, unfassbares Leid und viele Jahre harter Arbeit, die den Bewohnern nun bevorstehen. Andy Neumann nimmt die Leser mit in diese Situation und macht auf sehr persönliche Weise deutlich, welche Kämpfe die Bewohner des Ahrtals durchstehen mussten. Feinsinnig und mit einer Prise Humor, insbesondere aber von einem klaren Willen geprägt: weitermachen.

L'infinito errore rivela la storia segreta della pandemia, una versione che le fonti ufficiali non ci hanno mai, ancora, raccontato. Grazie a testimonianze e informazioni inedite - tra cui l'analisi di oltre diecimila documenti e l'accesso alle banche dati che registrano l'identità genetica dei virus - questa inchiesta ripercorre l'intero viaggio compiuto dal coronavirus: dalle grotte infestate di pipistrelli ai laboratori cinesi dove i nuovi agenti patogeni sono stati studiati in collaborazione con i centri di ricerca americani.

In The Frontlines of Peace, Séverine Autesserre, award-winning researcher and peacebuilder, examines the well-intentioned but inherently flawed peace industry. With examples drawn from across the globe, she reveals that peace can grow in the most unlikely circumstances. Contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn't require billions in aid or massive international interventions. Real, lasting peace requires giving power to local citizens.

En estos tiempos de coronavirus, de enorme --y aún incierto-- daño humano, económico y social, se está observando, analizando y debatiendo cómo la crisis y el prolongado confinamiento están cambiando nuestras costumbres, actividades, estados de ánimo, escalas de valores y prioridades.

On 1 October 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in one of the worst shipping disasters in decades. No one could fathom how a vessel equipped with satellite communications, a sophisticated navigation system, and cutting-edge weather forecasting could suddenly vanish - until now.