[PDF] The Apocalypse Factory eBook

Author : Hill Williams
Publisher : Washington State University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 39,57 MB
Release : 2021-06-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1636820557

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On the eve of World War II, news of an astonishing breakthrough filtered out of Germany. Scientists there had split uranium atoms. Researchers in the United States scrambled to verify results and further investigate this new science. Ominously, they soon recognized its potential to fuel the ultimate weapon--one able to release the energy of an uncontrolled chain reaction. By 1941, experiments led to the identification of plutonium, but laboratory work generated the new element in amounts far too small to be useful. Fearing the Nazis were on the verge of harnessing nuclear power, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gambled on an ambitious project to research and manufacture uranium and plutonium for military use. As research continued, engineers began to construct massive buildings in an isolated eastern Washington farming community. Within two years, Hanford became the world’s first plutonium factory. The incredibly complex operation was accomplished with a speed and secrecy unheard of today; few involved knew what they were building. But on August 9, 1945, when the “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki, the workers understood their part in changing the world. Hanford’s role did not end there. The facility produced plutonium throughout the Cold War. Some was used in tests conducted halfway around the world. Nuclear bombs were dropped on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, profoundly impacting the Marshall Islands people and forever altering their way of life. Through clear scientific explanations and personal reminiscences, Hill Williams traces Hanford’s role in the amazing and tragic story of the plutonium bomb.

Author : William Gillespie
Publisher : Catapult
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 10,61 MB
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1593764952

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Set in an alternate present that is a slightly, if dangerously, skewed version of our own, Keyhole Factory tracks the interwoven destinies of disparate characters up to and beyond the end of the world-as-we-know-it, brought on by a global super-virus. Beginning with a biting satire of an academic poetry conference, the novel moves on to encompass the stories of a poet-astronaut, a microbiologist contemplating an exit strategy from her high-level job designing biological weapons, a sports-car-driving killer who stages the aesthetic murders of utopian commune-dwellers, and a lone pirate radio disc jockey who may be the last person left alive broadcasting her story to nobody. Allowing form and content to shape each other, William Gillespie pries open the confusion in a moment of total crisis through a narrative web-work technique derived from deranged fiction pioneer Harry Stephen Keeler. Part imaginative free-for-all and part deeply felt examination of isolation and survival, the individual lives in Keyhole Factory shine through the chaos in all their beauty and tragedy. With his signature wit and originality, Gillespie spins a glittering fever-dream that questions our assumptions about the way we interpret events and our relation to the planet, without ever losing sight of the underlying experience of what it feels like to be a human being in the world we live in today.

Author : S. L. Sanger
Publisher : Continuing Education Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 30,80 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 9780876781159

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The history of the Hanford Engineering Works, a site in eastern Washington that produced and separated plutonium for the Manhattan Project.

Author : Steve Olson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 28,73 MB
Release : 2016-03-07
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0393242803

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A riveting history of the Mount St. Helens eruption that will "long stand as a classic of descriptive narrative" (Simon Winchester). For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State. The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian providences, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit. Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died. Powerful economic and historical forces influenced the fates of those around the volcano that sunny Sunday morning, including the construction of the nation’s railroads, the harvest of a continent’s vast forests, and the protection of America’s treasured public lands. The eruption of Mount St. Helens revealed how the past is constantly present in the lives of us all. At the same time, it transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and, ultimately, our perceptions of what it will take to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet. Rich with vivid personal stories of lumber tycoons, loggers, volcanologists, and conservationists, Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative built from the testimonies of those closest to the disaster, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world.

Author : Robert J. Dewar
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 23,27 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Automobile industry and trade
ISBN : 1438952945

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A Savage Factory is a true memoir straight from the factory floor of an automotive giant losing the global auto war to smaller, weaker, less experienced foreign competitors that beat us at our own game on our own turf. It gives an inside look, up close, at incompetent management at war with the labor force that created a quality nightmare and caused the car buying public to lose trust and faith in American cars. It is a true story of the inner workings of Ford's largest automatic transmission plant: the people, the machines, and the never ending war between management and labor that produced low quality cars that opened the door for foreign competitors to come to our country and take our auto market. It gives real life examples of the battlefield like conditions in the auto plants that caused alcoholism, drug addition, sexual harassment, and family breakdown, while producing transmissions that received the largest recall in automotive history and would have caused Ford Motor Company to go bankrupt had the Federal Government not intervened.

Author : Maureen F. McHugh
Publisher : Small Beer Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 46,90 MB
Release : 2011-11-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1931520356

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Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague. Praise for Maureen F. McHugh: "Gorgeously crafted stories."—Nancy Pearl, NPR "Hauntingly beautiful."—Booklist "Unpredictable and poetic work."—The Plain Dealer Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor's choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Author : Ling Ma
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 31,95 MB
Release : 2018-08-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374717117

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Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org “A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Author : Michael Shellenberger
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 14,70 MB
Release : 2020-06-30
Category : Science
ISBN : 0063001705

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Now a National Bestseller! Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Author : Mark O'Connell
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 19,28 MB
Release : 2020-04-14
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 0385543018

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AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.

Author : Melissa Gregg
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 23,14 MB
Release : 2013-04-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0745637469

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This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.