New items are available at the Hancock County Public Library.
The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
Adult Fiction
“My Year Abroad,” by Chang Rae Lee
Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong and of himself.
Adult Nonfiction
“COVID-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One,” by Debora Mackenzie
Over the last 30 years of epidemics and pandemics, nearly every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks had been learned. Almost none of them were heeded. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in this lifetime. Science journalist Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what must be done to prevent future pandemics. MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades and draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a potentially manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101 in how viruses spread and how pandemics end. She outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis and takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes the argument that this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, but it is possible.
