Breathless traces SARS-CoV-2's fierce journey through the human population as seen by the scientists who study its origin, ever-changing nature and capacity to kill. It shows how strange viruses emerge as we disrupt wild ecosystems - sometimes causing global catastrophe - and suggests this coronavirus could be a 'forever virus' that's destined to bedevil us endlessly.
Quammen also explains that experts saw this pandemic coming; that scientists warned 'the next big one' would be caused by a changeable new virus, but were ignored for political or economic reasons; and that while the origins of this virus may not be known for years, some suppositions are compelling and others can be dismissed.
Breathless takes us inside the frantic international effort to control SARS-CoV-2 as if peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase.

For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.”
In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women—more than a million in total—were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.
Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war—the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories.
Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war.
“But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown . . . I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.”—Svetlana Alexievich
THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
“for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us.
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were "thunder." In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries, searching for safety--perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.
When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, where she embarked on another journey--to excavate her past and, after years of being made to feel less than human, claim her individuality.
Raw, urgent, and bracingly original, The Girl Who Smiled Beads captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever destroyed; what can be repaired; the fragility of memory; the disorientation that comes of other people seeing you only as broken--thinking you need, and want, to be saved. But it is about more than the brutality of war. It is about owning your experiences, about the life we create: intricately detailed, painful, beautiful, a work in progress.

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>. This is the story of the girl who stole it.<br /><br />Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.<br /><br />Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.<br /><br />Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, <em>The Dictionary of Lost Words</em> reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

2009年诺贝尔文学奖得主赫塔·米勒巅峰期突破之作
以诗的凝炼、散文的率直，通过写作这沉默的行动，赋予弱小者以尊严
挣扎求生时的一呼一吸是那么艰难，像来回摆动的秋千
🔷编辑推荐
◎ 赫塔·米勒，2009年诺贝尔文学奖得主，生于罗马尼亚德语村庄，以诗的凝炼，散文的率直，描绘流离失所者的处境，通过写作这种沉默的行动，赋予弱小者以尊严。
◎ 《呼吸秋千》出版于2009年，被誉为“一部气势磅礴、夺人心魄及令人谦恭的小说。”是作者创作巅峰期的突破之作。
◎ 一部受难者与幸存者的记录本与见证书。第二次世界大战即将结束时，十七岁的少年雷奥帕德·奥伯克被征调到劳动营，他将面临的是严寒、饥饿、屈辱、恐惧，还有一呼一吸间秋千般的喘息。
🔷内容简介
一九四五年，二战即将结束时，罗马尼亚一群说德语的人被征派到俄国劳动营，小说讲述了十七岁的雷奥帕德·奥伯克的这段经历。饥饿与恐惧渗透到了呼吸之中，每一次呼吸都像荡秋千一样带来眩晕与痛苦。
🔷媒体推荐
一部罕见而有力的作品，一则强烈而持久的诗篇……米勒将具体事物提炼，融入极富张力的语言，并将这些事物灼烫在读者的心内。
——《明镜周刊》
🔷名人推荐
说不出来的东西还是可以写下来。因为写作是一种沉默的行动，一种由脑至手的劳作。——赫塔·米勒
赫塔·米勒是不应该忽视的作家。她就像一把尺子，丈量着时代、语言和虚构，也丈量着读者和她自己。
——邱华栋

本书讲述的是一个关于“盛世妖术”的故事。在中国的千年帝制时代，乾隆皇帝可谓是空前绝后的一人。他建立并巩固起来的大清帝国达到了权力与威望的顶端。然而整个大清的政治与社会生活却被一股名为“叫魂”的妖术搅得天昏地暗。在1768年由春天到秋天的那几个月里，这股妖风竟然冲击了半个中国，百性为之惶恐，官员为之奔命，连乾隆也为之寝食难安。作者孔飞力细致入微的描写令人颤栗，他生动地再现了各省的恐慌是如何演变成一场全国性的除妖运动。
本书也表现出了一种更为宏大的学术视野，在构建以“叫魂”案为中心的“大叙事”的过程中，在方法论的层次上将社会史、文化史、政治史、经济史、区域分析、官僚科层制度分析以及心理分析等研究方法结合在一起。

Churchill's history of the Second World War is, and will remain, the definitive work. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable, for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction. Milestones To Disaster is the first book in Churchill's account.