The author recounts his lifelong battle with anxiety, showing the many manifestations of the disorder as well as the countless treatments that have been developed to counteract it, and provides a history of the efforts to understand this common form of mental illness.

"In 1967, an extraterrestrial microbe came crashing down to Earth and nearly ended the human race. Accidental exposure to the particle--designated The Andromeda Strain--killed every resident of the town of Piedmont, Arizona, save for an elderly man and an infant boy. Over the next five days, a team of top scientists assigned to Project Wildfire worked valiantly to save the world from an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. In the moments before a...

In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola and Zika have provided vivid examples of how difficult it is to contain an infection once it strikes, and the panic that a rapidly spreading epidemic can ignite. But while we chase the diseases we are already aware of, new ones are constantly emerging, like the coronavirus that spread across the world in 2020. At the same time, antimicrobial resistance is harnessing infections that we once knew how to control, enabling...

"After decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours. Relying on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology, and medicine as well as field research in Sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe,...

"A military space probe, sent to collect extraterrestrial organisms from the upper atmosphere, is knocked out of orbit and falls to Earth. Twelve miles from the crash site, an inexplicable and deadly phenomenon terrorizes the residents of a sleepy desert town in Arizona, leaving only two survivors: an elderly addict and a newborn infant. The United States government is forced to mobilize Project Wildfire, a top-secret emergency response protocol....

"For a certain class of American's, Donald McNeil was a comforting voice when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. He was the regular reporter on the New York Times's popular Daily podcast, and he was telling folks to prepare for the worst. A generation of NYT readers went out and stocked up on food and PPE stuff because of his clear advice. He'd covered public health for the Times for 25 years and understood what he was seeing out of China. THE WISDOM...

Journalist Watters explores the American exportation of how the world goes mad, arguing that as we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.

The 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic was the deadliest ever--but the outbreaks continue. Now comes a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, an urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses--from the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone, soon to be a National Geographic original miniseries. This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly...

The story of anti-vaccine activity in America, its origins, leaders, influences, and impact.