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Science and Politics: Books

Call Number Ranges

Search the Library Catalog by clicking here to find books and videos available at the COD Library.   Help Using the Library Catalog

Some selected new books are highlighted here.

Use the Library Catalog to search for these books by keyword. 

Call number GB for water studies.

Call number GE for environmental studies.
Call number GF for human geography.
Call number Q 175.5 for science and politics.
Call number QC 900s for climate change.

Book series for researching Current Events and Controversial Topics

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Outline of the Library of Congress Classification System (what COD uses to arrange its books on the shelves).

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Selected New Books

Ethics - Questions and Morality of Human Actions

The second edition covers topics of recent interest to readers in the twenty-first century, such as Heroic medicine, Gender identity, Wealth inequality, LGBTQ issues, Female genital mutilation, Informed consent, and Transgender care. This encyclopedic work includes more than 1,000 essays organized by broad categories related to ethics issues: animal rights, arts and censorship, bioethics, business and labor, children's rights, civil rights, environmental issues, human rights, international relations, legal and judicial issues, the media, the military, personal and social ethics, political and economic ethics, psychological ethics, race and ethnicity, religion, science and technology, sex and gender, theory, and wealth.

Manual for Survival

Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health--which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between thirty-one and fifty-four people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.No major international study tallied the damage, leaving Japanese leaders to repeat many of the same mistakes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other nuclear incidents, and the fact that we are emerging into a future for which the survival manual has yet to be written.

Losing Earth

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late.Losing Earth is their story, and ours. The New York Times Magazinedevoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon--the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form,Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey'sHiroshima and Jonathan Schell'sThe Fate of the Earth,Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

  • URL: https://library.cod.edu/scienceandpolitics
  • Last Updated: Apr 4, 2024 11:07 AM
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