Here are 100 books that Prep For Doom fans have personally recommended if you like
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My research and writing in the field of emergency or disaster management has been focused on the concept of hazard mitigation. This means reducing the impact of disasters, the creation of hazard resilient and sustainable communities, and the application of scientific and technical expertise to the task. We all live in a world where it has become more important than ever to make intelligent decisions driven by a comprehension of the properties of the physical universe. It is also a world in which economic self-interest and political interests may impede that idealistic goal. I have a sense of urgency about reducing the efficacy of such impediments.
Barry’s dramatic historical account of the 1918 influenza pandemic has been called “fascinating,” “brilliant,” “sobering,” and “terrifying” by numerous reviewers.
It is a piece of history, the worst public health disaster in the century before COVID-19, that should have helped succeeding generations to take pandemic preparedness more seriously. It should have enhanced our understanding that during such a crisis, science must lead the way. Despite all that we did learn from the great influenza of 1918, we were unable to avoid many of the mistakes made when our leaders too often shunned the advice of science and made the COVID-19 pandemic political.
This book informed and influenced me greatly. It inspired me to see the need for and the importance of recording and learning from our experiences a century later.
At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, "The Great Influenza"…
My passion for this topic dates back to my childhood and being impressed by the scary diseases and unhygienic toilets that were part of my family lore. I grew up to be a historian of medicine, which allowed me to indulge my interest in deadly diseases—at a safe historical distance! That curiosity led me to write the Gospel of Germs, a history of popular understandings of the germ theory of disease. Post-COVID, I am thinking about how to get ready for the next big pandemic that climate change and globalization will likely throw at us: will it be bird flu, dengue, mpox, or some new COVID variant?
I love this book because Quammen looks at pandemics in terms of the changing relationships between humans and animals. A master of science writing, he explains how global economic and climate change is bringing us closer contact with many species in the wild—bats, parrots, chimpanzees—whose pathogens can “jump” to domestic animals (pigs and chickens). If you are worried about the bird flu, this is a great book to gain perspective on.
In 2020, the novel coronavirus gripped the world in a global pandemic and led to the death of hundreds of thousands. The source of the previously unknown virus? Bats. This phenomenon-in which a new pathogen comes to humans from wildlife-is known as spillover, and it may not be long before it happens again.
Prior to the emergence of our latest health crisis, renowned science writer David Quammen was traveling the globe to better understand spillover's devastating potential. For five years he followed scientists to a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, and a suburban…
I'm the author of short stories and novels including my young adult debut, Pandemic, which continues to be a timely read about surviving a widespread deadly virus. After the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 (commonly called Swine Flu), I was fascinated with the idea of a global illness that could be much, much worse. I researched historical diseases, interviewed public health officials, and the idea for my novel was born. Written and published before COVID-19, some of the details are eerily predictive of coronavirus. Pandemic won SCBWI’s Crystal Kite Award the year after its publication, and a June 2022 reissue of the original novel includes updated resources and backmatter.
During the flu pandemic of 1918,
the author, Katherine Anne Porter, became deathly ill but recovered. Published
over twenty years later, Pale Horse, Pale Rideris her fictionalized
account about falling in love with a soldier during the war, then fighting to
survive the influenza outbreak. I love that Porter drew from her own experience
to write this short novel. (She disliked the term novella.) Pale Horse, Pale Rideris a beautifully written story about a devastating disease.
The classic 1939 collection of three short novels, including the famous title story set during the flu epidemic of 1918.
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers evoke such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This sharp collection of three short novels includes “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter's most celebrated story, where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her boyfriend on his way to war. Also included is “Noon Wine,” a haunting story of tragedy and scandal…
I’ve always been a voracious reader of the news and history, consuming everything from Johnny Tremain to Slaughterhouse-Five, from old-fashioned newspapers to online news feeds. I’ve also always loved writing fiction. I aligned my interests in history, the news, and writing in my first novel, The Blood Lie, based on a hate crime in my hometown in the 1920s. Since then, I’ve written two other novels based on true events: Ripped Away and my novel, listed below.
This vivid YA novel about the impact of the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1918 holds a special place in my heart. The uncle I never knew died in that pandemic at age nine, and my mother was the “replacement baby” three years later.
So, I guess you could say I owe my existence to that pandemic. Beyond this personal attachment to the subject, I loved the deft portrayal of the main character’s internal turmoil: she wants to help the sick, but she doesn’t want to get sick herself.
I think anyone who lived through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic can relate. I know I do.
Schools, churches, and theaters shut down. The entire city is thrust into survival mode-and into a panic. Headstrong and foolish, seventeen-year-old Cleo is determined to ride out the pandemic in the comfort of her own home, rather than in her quarantined boarding school dorms. But when the Red Cross pleads for volunteers, she can't ignore the call. As Cleo struggles to navigate the world around her, she is surprised by how much she finds herself caring about near-strangers. Strangers like Edmund, a handsome medical student and war vet. Strangers who could be gone tomorrow. And as the bodies begin to…
I’ve written or edited thousands of science and engineering proposals, blog posts, and reports, and in the past decade, disaster resilience has become a major subject of these documents. I’ve come to realize that while it’s possible to be ready for disasters, few people truly are. In the books I’m recommending, something vital to life has been stolen and the disasters are so overpowering that mere survival is a nearly impossible goal. This forces the characters into unusual and heroic action. Their choices are sometimes surprising and always compelling, and I loved sharing their journeys.
It fascinates me how in a disaster, from one day to the next, nothing is ever the same again.
In Bird Box, where something is turning people violently suicidal, “…it definitely begins when a person sees something.”
At first there’s a rumor in a faraway country, but later the world abruptly changes. Nobody can be outside without a blindfold, millions are dying, and society collapses.
It would be bad enough to literally never see the world outside of your house, but then Malorie has to take a journey on a river…while blindfolded...with two blindfolded children…amidst creatures she knows almost nothing about.
That’s pure insanity that makes for a riveting, absorbing book, and Malorie’s determination is beyond inspiring.
Growing up in Zambia and then South Africa, I was immersed in the natural landscapes and the fantastic variety of African plants and wildlife. However, I increasingly became aware of many other human injustices happening around me—e.g., human to human: the extreme racism of white supremacy (apartheid). Additionally, human to other animals: the ivory and wildlife ‘trade,’ resulting in what has been called The Sixth Extinction (of plants and other animals.) Alongside this destruction of life is the critical climate crisis and the financial appropriation of vital resources for profit—none more vital than water, for water is life. These books emphasise the ethical sanctity of all living beings!
This is a wonderful and diverse cross-section of stories from a variety of African countries representing a thematic focus on a world facing Disruption, whether via climate change, global pandemics, or a plethora of crises, that challenges us all with the necessity to find ways to join with each other if we are to survive. Stand-out stories for me were Zambian author Mbozi Haimbe's "Shelter" (shortlisted for a NOMMO Award this year—best in African Speculative Fiction 2022) and Kenyan Idza Luhumyo’s "Five Years Next Sunday," winner of the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing. I loved the vibrancy and range of these stories, all bristling with energy and providing novel ways of seeing and learning to confront our global challenges.
Including 2022 Caine Prize winning story "Five Years Next Sunday" by Idza Luhumyo and the 2022 Nommo Award shortlisted story "Shelter" by Mzobi Haimbe
This genre-spanning anthology explores the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. These evocative, often prescient, stories showcase new and emerging writers from across Africa to investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more.
In Disruption, authors from across Africa use their stories to explore the concept of change-environmental, political, and physical-and the power or impotence of the…
In 2006, I told a friend I wanted to write a book about grieving the death of a friend. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she gave me her enthusiastic approval. Six months later she was dead. She inspired me to turn that book idea into a series of little books: the Friend Grief series. Just as I was finishing the last one, I began work on a full-length book that took me back to my work in the early days of AIDS. When COVID began, I returned to writing about friend grief. And I lost over a dozen friends while I wrote the book.
One of the many wistful and beautiful photos in this book caught my eye in an exhibit at the New York Historical Society in 2021.
Her photography, and the attendant essays, evoke not only the isolation of quarantine, but the ways we rediscovered the desire for human connection. What could be easier than meeting a friend, careful to stay 6’ apart? Or sadder?
In April 2020, when New York was in lockdown and the epicentre of the pandemic, Renate Aller created the project side walk. She hosted friends and neighbors on her sidewalk or visited them in their street, her camera in self timer mode, recording these masked encounters at a safe 6 feet distance. With voices muted by masks we learn to communicate with our eyes and body language, finding our bearings in a new emotional landscape. These sidewalk visits created a deep sense of community where community had been forced apart. This project is in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke:…
Like many of my generation, my formal introduction to the zombie genre started with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Stories of the zombie apocalypse, and the arterial sprays, dismemberments, and eviscerations that accompanied it, have fascinated me ever since. But, I'm also a psychology professor. Although I was initially captivated by the carnage of the undead, I quickly found that the mindsets of the survivors were equally fascinating. More than anything, I love seeing how fictional worlds represent real-world psychological concepts.
When the dead roam, this book will function as a med-school, first responder, and training physician all rolled into one. That's a good thing, for medical professionals will be at ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. And most won't survive the first few days of the dead, as preserving life will seem more paramount than preserving death. And by the time staff figure out that both are equally important, it will be too late. Nevertheless, those who survive the apocalypse's initial stages will eventually need medical care. Even a minor wound could prove deadly if poorly cleaned. I found the information and practical advice in the book fascinating and potentially helpful under dire circumstances.
THIS IS YOUR BOOK OF SECRETS The one ensuring your survival! If you've been afraid of what's coming, rest easy, those days are over! By cutting the extra and expanding the essential, we've combined the most important sections from our Survival Medicine series, The Prepper Pages, & created this Mini Med School - just for preppers. An apocalypse is inevitable, because the term "Zombie Apocalypse" is a metaphor for expecting the unexpected. By covering hundreds of conditions known to occur frequently in disasters, this book is going to leave you confident with the way you'll react in medical emergencies. It's…
I am an author who also penned a novel during the pandemic, with a timeline that stretched into the first six months of the pandemic–against the advice of my agent and the publishing industry at large. I know many authors choose not to write about intense political and social happenings, but that “life will never be the same again” feeling was something I couldn’t avoid. The pandemic threw people together and kept us apart at the same time. I was intensely interested in its incubator effect as well as the silo aspect quarantining had on all of our lives.
Elizabeth Strout is perfecting a practice I’m sold on–the literary recasting of characters from one novel to the next.
In this book, I got to return to Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, who were thrown together in a cabin in Maine due to the pandemic. Writing the novel from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Strout includes this pragmatic character’s interior musings, specifically the things we increasingly noticed as time slowed down during COVID.
I could so relate to Lucy’s quirky character: give me ornery, critical, and desperate any day! Weren’t we all?
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown—and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.
“No novelist working today has Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy. . . . May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy’s story.”—The Boston Globe
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Time, The…
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
One of the best academic books written at convergence of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics isThe Virus Touch.
Here, Bishnupriya Ghosh showcases how “epidemic media” inform how epidemics are understood and experienced—making this text so relevant right now. She looks at how media—images, numbers, and digital models—whether generated by scientists, artists, or activists enable us to see and understand viruses and bear witness to their effects in new ways.
What is unique about Ghosh’s scholarship is how looks to the environment to study health which illustrates the complex and tangled relationships between epidemics, humans, animals, and media. Ghosh’s rich examples, ranging from modelling viruses to reading test results to tracking infection rates and mortality numbers, ensure that Virus Touch speaks to diverse readers.
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains…
