#hardcover #covid #currentaffairs #medical #nonfiction #pandemic 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

2022 Genesis Prize Laureate

The exclusive, first-hand, behind-the-scenes story of how Pfizer raced to create the first Covid-19 vaccine, told by Pfizer's Chairman and CEO Dr. Albert Bourla.

A riveting, fast-paced, inside look at one of the most incredible private sector achievements in history, Moonshot recounts the intensive nine months in 2020 when the scientists at Pfizer, under the visionary leadership of Dr. Albert Bourla, made "the impossible possible"--creating, testing, and manufacturing a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine that previously would have taken years to develop. 

Dr. Bourla chronicles how the brilliant, dedicated minds at Pfizer, under the enormous strains of the global pandemic, overcame a series of crises that were compounded by social and political unrest, and reveals the doubts, decisions, obstacles, and failures they encountered. As Dr. Bourla makes clear, Pfizer's success wasn't due to luck; it was because of preparation driven by four simple values--Courage, Excellence, Equity, and Joy.

Moonshot is a story of leadership under the most unprecedented circumstances--how Dr. Bourla, a Greek immigrant, a child of Holocaust survivors, and a veterinarian, became the head of one of the world's largest corporations and initiated a dramatic transformation of the organization just before a global health crisis would serve to test the organization, its scientists, and its leader, like never before. Moonshot describes best practices that can be used to address the multiple, unprecedented challenges our world faces, reveals Pfizer's implementation of scientific breakthroughs at a record-breaking pace, and offers leadership lessons that can help anyone successfully manage their own seemingly unsolvable problems. As Dr. Bourla explains, "I am sharing the story of our moonshot--the challenges we faced, the lessons we learned, and the core values that allowed us to make it happen--in hopes that it might inspire and inform your own moonshot, whatever that may be."

Moonshot

336804a3-5c39-4a44-a76d-8b9a4349e139-1

#hardcover #currentaffairs #covid #medicalhistory #pandemic #vaccine 

Pennsylvania

Torn dust jacket, slight damage to spine. #hardcover #nonfiction #science #vaccine

Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

"Riveting . . . [The Vaccine Race] invites comparison with Rebecca Skloot's 2007 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."--Nature 

"This is a story about the war against disease--a war without end--and the development of enormously important vaccines, but in telling that story, in showing how science works, Meredith Wadman reveals much more. I loved this book."
--John M. Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Influenza

The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases.
 
Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles and adenovirus.
 
Meredith Wadman's masterful account recovers not only the science of this urgent race, but also the political roadblocks that nearly stopped the scientists. She describes the terrible dilemmas of pregnant women exposed to German measles and recounts testing on infants, prisoners, orphans, and the intellectually disabled, which was common in the era. These events take place at the dawn of the battle over using human fetal tissue in research, during the arrival of big commerce in campus labs, and as huge changes take place in the laws and practices governing who "owns" research cells and the profits made from biological inventions. It is also the story of yet one more unrecognized woman whose cells have been used to save countless lives.
 
With another frightening virus imperiling pregnant women on the rise today, no medical story could have more human drama, impact, or urgency today than The Vaccine Race.

The Vaccine Race

87a1cb48-adc0-4937-9dff-8c3603d20eda-1

Mary Higgins Clark

Connecticut

When a corporate scandal leads to a boy's mysterious disappearance, the wife of a fugitive businessman assumes that her husband is accountable, only to learn that the consequences of corporate misdeeds can be a matter of life and death.

The Second Time Around

c56ea32a-61f5-48a9-8896-507e8d717cd3-1

Steve Stirling

If only I’d been given a sixty-cent dose of polio vaccine, none of this would have happened.…”
Born in Korea in 1956 soon after the end of the Korean War, Steve Stirling was stricken with polio at age one. Five years later, marital and financial struggles caused his father to abandon him at an orphanage. Shortly afterward, his three-year-old sister was left there as well.
The Crutch of Success tells Steve’s incredible story of early years in the orphanage, his adoption into a large, loving family in Alaska, and his determination to succeed. He earned degrees at Cornell and Northwestern universities, married the woman who was literally the answer to his prayers, and climbed the corporate ladder with several Fortune 500 companies.
Steve seemed to have it all…but his ambition was detrimental to his health, his family, and his soul.
Then God touched Steve and asked him to spend his life helping those in need. All of the experiences of his life, even polio, have prepared him for his role at MAP International—to bring life-saving medicines and health supplies to millions around the world.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)



Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

From Polio to Purpose, Bringing Health & Hope to the World

The Crutch of Success

9c2b3d2f-6172-4f5d-82c6-f47fd2006fbc-0

Gregory Zuckerman

Nebraska

The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine

"An inspiring and informative page-turner." –Walter Isaacson Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award The authoritative account of the race to produce the vaccines that are saving us all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Solved the Market Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world’s biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn’t muster an effective response. It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization. A French businessman dismissed by many as a fabulist. A Turkish immigrant with little virus experience. A quirky Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells. A Boston scientist employing questionable techniques. A British scientist despised by his peers. Far from the limelight, each had spent years developing innovative vaccine approaches. Their work was met with skepticism and scorn. By 2020, these individuals had little proof of progress. Yet they and their colleagues wanted to be the ones to stop the virus holding the world hostage. They scrambled to turn their life’s work into life-saving vaccines in a matter of months, each gunning to make the big breakthrough—and to beat each other for the glory that a vaccine guaranteed. A #1 New York Times bestselling author and award-winning Wall Street Journal investigative journalist lauded for his “bravura storytelling” (Gary Shteyngart) and “first-rate” reporting (The New York Times), Zuckerman takes us inside the top-secret laboratories, corporate clashes, and high-stakes government negotiations that led to effective shots. Deeply reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It’s a story of courage, genius, and heroism. It’s also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities, and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.

A Shot to Save the World

e53563da-b3f7-4e7a-a104-315a15b36ed0-1

Julia Alvarez

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

A Novel

Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later. The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It's the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live "carriers" of the vaccine. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y Gómez, director of La Casa de Expósitos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed— with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel's adventures. This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. In depicting their confrontation of the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition. Julia Alvarez’s new novel, Afterlife, is available now.

Saving the World

739a0140-3921-4c53-8465-c4535e8df375-1

New Jersey

How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children

Public health officials state that vaccines are safe and effective, but the truth is far more complicated. Vaccination is a serious medical intervention that always carries the potential to injure and cause death as well as to prevent disease. Coercive vaccination policies deprive people of free and informed consent--the hallmark of ethical medicine. Americans are increasingly concerned about vaccine safety and the right to make individual, informed choices together with their healthcare practitioners. Vaccine Epidemic focuses on the searing debate surrounding individual and parental vaccination choice in the United States.

Habakus, Holland, and Rosenberg edit and introduce a diverse array of interrelated topics concerning the explosive vaccine controversy, including the ethics of vaccination mandates, corrupting conflicts of interest in the national vaccine program, and personal narratives of parents, children, and soldiers who have suffered vaccine injury.

Newly updated with additional chapters focusing on institutional scientific misconduct, mandates for healthcare workers, concerns about HPV vaccine development, and the story behind the Supreme Court's recent vaccine decision, Vaccine Epidemic remains the essential handbook for the vaccination choice movement and required reading for all people contemplating vaccination for themselves and their children.


Vaccine Epidemic

94b0574a-6ae8-4dc6-8951-61714f43ed68-1

Washington

The Ring and I, First Edition 1994

Never read before, don’t have any plans of reading it anymore!

Michael Kinch

California

A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity

A smart and compelling examination of the science of immunity, the public policy implications of vaccine denial, and the real-world outcomes of failing to vaccinate. If you have a child in school, you may have heard stories of long-dormant diseases suddenly reappearing—cases of measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough cropping up everywhere from elementary schools to Ivy League universities because a select group of parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent—and could easily be undone. In the tradition of John Barry’s The Great Influenza and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.

Save this search

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Meredith Wadman

The Vaccine Race

Mary Higgins Clark

The Second Time Around

Steve Stirling

The Crutch of Success

Gregory Zuckerman

A Shot to Save the World

Julia Alvarez

Saving the World

Louise Kuo Habakus (Editor); Mary Holland (Editor); Garry Bennett; Kim Mack Rosenberg (Editor)

Vaccine Epidemic

Jessica Richardson

The Ring and I, First Edition 1994

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Michael Kinch

Between Hope and Fear

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Browse by categories

Save this search

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Meredith Wadman

The Vaccine Race

Mary Higgins Clark

The Second Time Around

Steve Stirling

The Crutch of Success

Gregory Zuckerman

A Shot to Save the World

Julia Alvarez

Saving the World

Louise Kuo Habakus (Editor); Mary Holland (Editor); Garry Bennett; Kim Mack Rosenberg (Editor)

Vaccine Epidemic

Jessica Richardson

The Ring and I, First Edition 1994

Albert Bourla

Moonshot

Michael Kinch

Between Hope and Fear

Albert Bourla

Moonshot