Industrial Society

Fascinating, inarguable, passionately written, Weathering draws on thirty years of accessible scientific research to explore the harmful effects of living in an oppressive society, causing illness and earlier death to marginalised groups—as well as extraordinary resilience. This will be a landmark American non-fiction publication that will make us all think about Black Lives Matter beyond police killings and into every aspect of life, from housing to education to healthcare and help answer urgent questions about the disproportionate deaths from Covid-19 among BAME people.

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realize. The legacy of epidemics, Brian Michael Jenkins observes, is not only one of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder, all of which have severe political repercussions.