Books about Microbes from Amazon.com

Smart gardeners know that soil is anything but an inert substance Healthy soil is teeming with life-not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants, and thus become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial substances, many of them toxic to humans as well as other forms of life. But there is an alternative to this vicious circle: to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web-the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants. By eschewing jargon and overly technical language, the authors make the benefits of cultivating the soil food web available to a wide audience, from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants without resorting to chemicals..
Price: $15.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $8.27 [Notify me when price goes down.]

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes " All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.

Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.

Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

.
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A noted medical historian places recent outbreaks of deadly diseases in historical perspective, with accounts of other alarming and recurring diseases throughout history and of the ways in which humans have adapted. Reprint. 17,500 first printing..
Price: $4.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Two complete novels and a short novel in one large volume:

Falling Free—The Nebula Award-winning novel. Leo Graf was just your typical efficient engineer: mind your own business and do the job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where children had been bio-engineered to have four arms (and no legs) to function in zero gravity. Now that they're no longer needed, a heartless mega corporation is getting rid of them before they eat into the profit margin. Leo Graf adopted 1000 quaddies—now he had to teach them to be free.

“Labyrinth”—When Miles Vorkosigan is captured while on a secret mission to a lawless world, his only hope of escape is an unlikely pair of allies: a quaddie and a teenage werewolf.

Diplomatic Immunity— Miles Vorkosigan and his wife were heading home for the births of their first children, but a major diplomatic disaster is looming at Graf Station, colonized by the descendants of the original quaddies, and duty calls. Unfortunately, diplomatic immunity doesn't carry over to immunity from a very nasty biological weapon. The downside of being a troubleshooter comes when trouble starts shooting back. . . .

.
Price: $5.58 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In 1947, the U.S. Army left behind a secret when they closed Ft. Miles, Delaware A threat so deadly, they buried it 1000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, sixty years later, an oil rig drilling off the coast of Delaware has hit something. Within hours, crew members are dying from a mysterious illness that kills unmercifully.

On the opposite coast, Justin Flannigan, an estranged epidemiologist is visited by the director of the CDC who convinces him to come to Delaware to investigate the bizarre illness. But shortly after he begins his investigation, he gets another visit. This time from an eccentric old man who claims to know the origin of the deadly contagion, and soon, Justin begins to suspect that there is more to this sickness than what first appeared. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour.

As the illness spreads to the general population, Justin realizes that this one old man may hold the key not only to his survival, but to the survival of the entire planet..
Price: $7.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Cancer Microbe is a revolutionary book shwoing that the infectious cause of cancer is already known and that the discovery has been known for a century..
Price: $19.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]