Washoe County Library System

"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American...

"It wasn't too long ago that the average American didn't know who Anthony Fauci was. Now, after the coronavirus has spread nationwide, he's arguably the most powerful bureaucrat in American history. But is it dangerous for a free society to concentrate so much power in the hands of an unelected official? Who or what holds Fauci accountable?"--

Drawing on new interviews with whistleblower doctors in Wuhan, a Walkley Award-winning journalist, in this part-thriller, part-expose, investigates the origins of COVID-19, the conspiracies, and the classified research.

"By weaving his experiences with information on the rise of anti-science sentiment, how it was funneled into a movement, and how it has become a tool of far-right political figures around the world, the author opens readers' eyes to the dangerous world itcreates. Even as he paints a picture of the world under a shadow of aggressive ignorance, he demonstrates his innate optimism, offering suggestions for how science denial can be met by other active...

"What is the true origin of COVID-19? President Joe Biden has ordered US intelligence agencies to further investigate the origins of COVID-19. Clearly, the US government isn't decided on what really happened at the start of the pandemic. Was it truly a animal to human transmission to be blamed on a bat in a Wuhan, China wet market? Or was a much more sinister plan at work? In 2020, Dr. Richard M. Fleming began investigating SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19....

"The stories I have chosen reflect where I feel the field of science and nature writing has landed, and where it could go," Ed Yong writes in his introduction. "They are often full of tragedy, sometimes laced with wonder, but always deeply aware that science does not exist in a social vacuum. They are beautiful, whether in their clarity of ideas, the elegance of their prose, or often both." The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature...

In this real-life detective story, a scientist and writer team up to try to discover how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in Wuhan.

Since early 2020, the world has experienced a series of catastrophic events—a global pandemic caused by what appears to be an engineered coronavirus; international lockdowns and border closings causing widespread business closures, economic collapse, and massive unemployment; and an unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties and freedoms in the name of keeping people safe by locking them up in their homes. We are now living in a world that is...

From the bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking and Make Russia Great Again comes a comic tour de force, the story of one man’s spiraling journey through lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal South Carolina town with his beloved second wife, Peaches. He’s been binge-eating for a year and developed a notable rapport with the local fast-food chain Hippo King. He struggles...

"Pete and Alice in Maine is a tender, big-hearted, clear-eyed portrait of a marriage, and a family, in crisis—set during the plague years when the entire world was in crisis. As she investigates the insidious effect of lies, betrayal, fear, and anger, not to mention the mundane joys and wrenching heartaches of everyday life, Caitlin Shetterly gets to the heart of what it means to be a family.” — Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling...