Search results for ""Author Alex Perry""

One day in 2006, the rich, well connected but very private philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through the holiday snaps of his friend, the development economist Jeffrey Sachs, and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. 'They're not sleeping,' Sachs tells a shocked Chambers. 'They're in malarial comas.' A few days later, they were all dead. So begins Chambers' mission to eradicate a disease that has haunted mankind since before medicine began, still infects half a billion people a year, and kills a million of them. The campaign draws in presidents, celebrities, scientists and enormous funding and becomes a stunning success, saving millions of lives and propelling Africa towards prosperity. And by replacing traditional ideas of assistance with business acumen and hustle, Chambers upturns the whole notion of aid, forging a new path not just for the developing world but for global business, religion and even celebrity. As he follows three years of the campaign, award-winning journalist Alex Perry takes the reader across Africa, from a terrifying visit to a Ugandan town that is the most malarial on earth to a star-studded World Cup concert, encountering jungle scientists, fugitive guerrillas, presidents, religious leaders and icons of the global aid industry. In Lifeblood, he weaves together science and history with on-the-ground reporting and a riveting expose of aid as he documents this race against time. The result is a thrilling and all-too-rare tale of humanitarian triumph that has profound implications for how to build a better world.

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Jeremiah's heart monitor is a snitch. It's supposed to let him play soccer, but every time he's about to score a goal, it tells on him for getting excited. So when the monitor tries to ruin his first big game, Jeremiah smashes it. He doesn't need it. He's fine. Until he has a heart attack and spends his twelfth birthday in the hospital.J6 is a pig who knows he's destined for greatness. He's the only one of his five brothers who survived the research lab. Though he's never left his cell, he thinks of himself as a therapy pig, a scholar, and a bodyguard. But when the research lab sends him to live with Jeremiah's family, he knows what he wants his new title to be: Jeremiah's brother.At first, Jeremiah thinks his parents took in J6 to cheer him up. But why does he need a dumb pig that's going to tackle his mom, destroy his birthday cake, and ruin his first kiss? Before long, Jeremiah begins to suspect there's more to his new curly-tailed companion than meets the eye. When the truth is revealed just as Jeremiah and J6 are feeling like actual brothers, they must do whatever it takes in order to protect each other-even if their lives depend on it.

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You are born into it or marry in. Loyalty is absolute, bloodshed revered and you kill or go to your grave before betraying The Family. This code of omertà is how the 'Ndrangheta became the world’s most powerful mafia. The Good Mothers is the story of the women who broke the silence. We live in their buildings, work in their companies, shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants and elect politicians they fund. Founded more than 150 years ago by shepherding families in the toe of Italy, the ’Ndrangheta is today the world’s most powerful mafia, with a crushing presence in southern Italy, a market-moving size in global finance and a reach that extends to fifty countries around the world. And yet, remarkably, few of us have ever heard of it. The ’Ndrangheta’s power rests on a code of silence, omertà, enforced by a claustrophobic family hierarchy and murderous misogyny. Men and boys rule. Girls are married off as teenagers in arranged clan alliances. Beatings are routine. A woman who is ‘unfaithful’ – even to a dead husband – can expect her sons, brothers or father to kill her to erase the ‘family shame’. In 2009, when abused wife Lea Garofalo ‘disappears’ after giving evidence against her mafiosi husband, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti realises the ’Ndrangheta’s bigotry may be its great flaw. The key to bringing down this criminal empire is to free its women and allow them to speak out and testify. When Alessandra finds two collaborators inside Italy’s biggest crime families, she must persuade them to cooperate, and save themselves and their children. The stakes could not be higher. Alessandra is fighting to save a nation. The mafiosi are fighting for their existence. The women are fighting for their lives. Not all will survive.

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Taking the Great Rift Valley - the geological fault that will eventually tear Africa in two - as his central metaphor, Alex Perry explores the split between a resurgent Africa and a world at odds with its rise. Africa has long been misunderstood - and abused - by outsiders. Perry travelled the continent for most of a decade, meeting with entrepreneurs and warlords, professors and cocaine smugglers, presidents and jihadis, among many others.Opening with a devastating investigation into a largely unreported war crime in Somalia in 2011, he finds Africa at a moment of furious self-assertion. This is a remade continent, defiantly rising from centuries of oppression to become an economic and political titan: where cash is becoming a thing of the past, where astronomers are unlocking the origin of life and where, twenty-five years after Live Aid, Ethiopia's first yuppies are traders on an electronic food exchange. Yet, as Africa finally wins the substance of its freedom, it must confront the three last false prophets of Islamists, dictators and aid workers, who would keep it in its bonds.

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