Controversial Knowledge

From the prize-winning author of To Be a Machine - meet the men and women preparing for the end of the world In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small groups of determined men and women are getting read...y. They are environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate change; billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars; and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilization as we know it. Not unconcerned himself by the possibility of the end of days, Mark O'Connell set out to meet them.
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Taking each theory in turn, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know considers more than 80 conspiracies, examining the evidence and key suspects in an explosive account of the world's secrets.

Are you ready for the end of the world? In the remote forests of the British Isles, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small determined groups of men and women are getting ready. They are environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate ...change; billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars; and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilisation as we know it. Not unconcerned himself by the possibility of the end of days, Mark O'Connell takes the reader from the ruins of Chernobyl to the pristine beauty of the Scottish Highlands, from online prepper subcultures to a Los Angeles convention on colonising outer space, and meets the eccentrics, madmen and visionaries getting ready for our final act. Full of wit, warmth and a dash of existential dread, The Day of Trouble is a very funny book about the end of the world that will make you want to enjoy every moment we have left.
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Award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer reveals the shocking truth behind the rise of Andrew Wakefield ? the so-called father of the anti-vaccine movement. In February 1998, a then-unknown British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published an explosive scientific paper in a top ...medical journal, The Lancet. Researching twelve developmentally challenged children, he claimed to have found evidence that MMR, the lifesaving three-in-one vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella, was causing a frightening 'new syndrome' of autism and bowel disease. As a result, a generation of young parents were terrified, and vaccination rates plummeted. In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, Brian Deer cuts to the heart of the most damaging medical conspiracy of our time. The only journalist to crack Wakefield's secrets, Deer explains how he gained legal access to patients' records, uncovering the truth about their histories and diagnoses, His landmark fifteen-year inquiry saw Wakefield struck from the medical register, his research retracted, and his claims about MMR dubbed 'an elaborate fraud'. In this riveting detective story, Deer lays bare the rigged research, secret business schemes, and financial and commercial conflicts of interest that lay behind Wakefield's original false claims - and the continuing smear campaigns that have aimed to keep the truth hidden. Now resurrected in the United States, Wakefield dominates a broader international anti-vaccine campaign, exporting his claims everywhere. Alarmingly, widespread outbreaks of measles have returned to threaten children's health. As before, the facts don't fit the story, but that hasn't got in the way of Wakefield's new campaign.
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Why does nature try to kill us?