Seymour Grufferman

Broschiertes Buch

The Bag Boys' Jihad

Beschreibung

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." -Tommy Thompson, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, December 7, 2004 Just before he was killed, Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, meet with al Qaeda's Shura Council in an abandoned house in Pakistan. They discuss plans for a new holy war, a large-scale bioterrorism attack on the US. For this war, they will partner with their former enemy, the Iranians. The plan includes collecting samples containing infectious agents such as cholera germs from patients seen in hospital emergency rooms in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The samples are then sent to a makeshift laboratory in North Waziristan where the pathogens are propagated and packaged for shipment to the US. Meanwhile in the US, a network of American-born radicalized teen-agers is recruited and deployed as bag boys in supermarkets. When Winston Sage, M.D., an offbeat, retired epidemiologist living in Santa Fe, was invited to serve on a boondoggle State Committee on Bioterrorism, the last thing he could have imagined was that he would unravel al Qaeda's planned strike on the US; be enlisted by the FBI; and be personally commended by the President at the White House. Sage's unorthodox thinking clashes with the FBI, but ultimately helps abort the attacks-well, almost. Praise for The Bag Boys' Jihad: "As in Grufferman's (The Warring States Conundrum, 2017) preceding novel, Win is a likable protagonist. He has strong opinions but is open to others' suggestions; consequently, people listen to him, even if his early declaration of an epidemic sounds far-fetched. The author astutely shows the intricacies of the terrorists' plan, especially the multitude of participants. Some are devout while others are horrified upon realizing the leaders consider certain individuals expendable. Intelligent dialogue makes discussions about various strains of disease perfectly comprehensible, aided by a steady momentum via brief chapters. Humor comes primarily from Win's wife, Julia, whose sardonic comments are endearing. Once Win is entangled in the potential terrorist plot, she simply says: 'I told you not to get involved with this dumb project.' An absorbing jihadist thriller bolstered by complex villains and a winsome, levelheaded protagonist." -Kirkus Reviews

Autor

Seymour Grufferman is a physician-epidemiologist who also holds two masters' degrees and a doctorate in public health from Harvard. He has held faculty positions at several universities-Haile Selassie I, Duke, Pittsburgh and New Mexico-and has published numerous articles in leading scientific journals. He taught and practiced public health in Ethiopia where he saw first-hand many of the diseases described in this novel. In addition to teaching in Third World countries such as Pakistan and Zambia, he has traveled widely from Afghanistan to Tanzania and draws on these experiences to create vivid images of the novel's settings. His life-long research interest has been on the question of whether human cancer is caused by infectious agents and can be transmitted from person-to-person. After being invited to participate in conferences on U.S. food safety, he became deeply concerned about the startling vulnerability of U.S. food supplies to terrorist attack. He is retired and lives with his wife and dog in the hills outside of Santa Fe, NM.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Seymour Grufferman MD
• Seitenzahl: 298
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. September 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 435g
• ISBN-13: 9781732330214
• ISBN-10: 1732330212
• Artikelnr.: 61830658