"More than a horrifying tale... also a penetrating examination of causes." -Denis Wood, author,The Power of Maps Seventy-one years before the Titanic, a ship loaded with Irish immigrants struck an iceberg and plunged to the ocean floor. The ship's crew stepped into two lifeboats, leaving more than half the passengers behind. Fearing for their lives, one overburdened boat's crew threw 14 men and women overboard. And the story of The Wreck of the William Brown had only begun. This chronicle of one of the 19th century's most infamous sea disasters and the uproar that followed presents a portrait of a forgotten time, re-creates a defining maritime trial, and tells of back room legal shenanigans. Newspaper readership was exploding in the 1840s, and journalists jumped on this sensational story. The resulting investigations and trial gave us the concept of "lifeboat ethics."

The Wreck of the William Brown : A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea

Engineering & Transportation

KOCH, Tom

Transportation

International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press

A maritime disaster that shocked the world. 
Seventy-one years before the loss of the Titanic, another ship sank in almost the same spot after striking an iceberg at maximum speed. Three-quarters of the passengers—poor, mostly Irish emigrants—were lost, including at least fourteen who were thrown from a lifeboat to lighten it. Not a single sailor died. 
When the tragedy of the William Brown threatened to expose the dangers of the profitable emigrant passenger trade, a collection of politicians, lawyers, and reporters on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to indict the only seaman who was a hero of the disaster. The trial gave rise to the concept of "lifeboat ethics": how to decide who gets saved when resources are limited. 
"A fascinating read."—Chesapeake Bay Magazine 
"A gripping tale of the sea. . . . You should make a place for this one on your bookshelf, nautical or otherwise."—Burgee 
"More than a horrifying tale . . . also a penetrating examination of the causes."—Denis Wood, author, The Power of Maps 
"Tom Koch's re-creation of a notorious 19th-century case of shipwreck and murder on the high seas makes absorbing reading."—Michael Phillips, maritime historian, Plymouth (England) Naval Base Museum 
"Gripping tale of a 19th-century shipwreck that should have been, but wasn't, a catalyst for major shipping reform."—Quill &amp; Quire

The Wreck of the William Brown: A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea

History

Americas

In the seventeenth century, a map of the plague suggested a radical idea—that the disease was carried and spread by humans. In the nineteenth century, maps of cholera cases were used to prove its waterborne nature. More recently, maps charting the swine flu pandemic caused worldwide panic and sent shockwaves through the medical community. In Disease Maps, Tom Koch contends that to understand epidemics and their history we need to think about maps of varying scale, from the individual body to shared symptoms evidenced across cities, nations, and the world. Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed example of its power. Koch then traces the early history of medical cartography, including pandemics such as European plague and yellow fever, and the advancements in anatomy, printing, and world atlases that paved the way for their mapping. Moving on to the scourge of the nineteenth century—cholera—Koch considers the many choleras argued into existence by the maps of the day, including a new perspective on John Snow’s science and legacy. Finally, Koch addresses contemporary outbreaks such as AIDS, cancer, and H1N1, and reaches into the future, toward the coming epidemics. Ultimately, Disease Maps redefines conventional medical history with new surgical precision, revealing that only in maps do patterns emerge that allow disease theories to be proposed, hypotheses tested, and treatments advanced.

Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground

University of Chicago Press

Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine (Basic Bioethics)

An argument against the “lifeboat ethic” of contemporary bioethics that views medicine as a commodity rather than a tradition of care and caring.
Bioethics emerged in the 1960s from a conviction that physicians and researchers needed the guidance of philosophers in handling the issues raised by technological advances in medicine. It blossomed as a response to the perceived doctor-knows-best paternalism of the traditional medical ethic and today plays a critical role in health policies and treatment decisions. Bioethics claimed to offer a set of generally applicable, universally accepted guidelines that would simplify complex situations. In Thieves of Virtue, Tom Koch contends that bioethics has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, he argues, bioethics has promoted a view of medicine as a commodity whose delivery is predicated not on care but on economic efficiency.
At the heart of bioethics, Koch writes, is a “lifeboat ethic” that assumes “scarcity” of medical resources is a natural condition rather than the result of prior economic, political, and social choices. The idea of natural scarcity requiring ethical triage signaled a shift in ethical emphasis from patient care and the physician's responsibility for it to neoliberal accountancies and the promotion of research as the preeminent good. 
The solution to the failure of bioethics is not a new set of simplistic principles. Koch points the way to a transformed medical ethics that is humanist, responsible, and defensible.

Engineering

MIT Press]

An exploration of moral stress, distress, and injuries inherent in modern society through the maps that pervade academic and public communications worlds.
In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.
The book begins with a general grounding in both moral stress and mapping as a means of investigation. The author then examines the ethical dilemmas of mapmakers and others in the popular media and the sciences, including graphic artists, journalists, researchers, and social scientists. Koch expands from the particular to the general, from mapmaker and journalist to the readers of maps and news. He explores the moral stress and injury in educational funding, poverty, and income inequality ("Why aren't we angry that one in eight fellow citizens lives in federally certified poverty?"), transportation modeling (seen in the iconic map of the London transit system and the hidden realities of exclusion), and U.S. graft organ transplantation.
This uniquely interdisciplinary work rewrites our understanding of the nature of moral stress, distress and injury, and ethics in modern life. Written accessibly and engagingly, it transforms how we think of ethics―personal and professional―amid the often conflicting moral injunctions across modern society.
Copublished with Esri Press

Ethics in Everyday Places: Mapping Moral Stress, Distress, and Injury (Basic Bioethics)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

The MIT Press

An exploration of moral stress, distress, and injuries inherent in modern society through the maps that pervade academic and public communications worlds. In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, "you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded. The book begins with a general grounding in both moral stress and mapping as a means of investigation. The author then examines the ethical dilemmas of mapmakers and others in the popular media and the sciences, including graphic artists, journalists, researchers, and social scientists. Koch expands from the particular to the general, from mapmaker and journalist to the readers of maps and news. He explores the moral stress and injury in educational funding, poverty, and income inequality ("Why aren't we angry that one in eight fellow citizens lives in federally certified poverty?"), transportation modeling (seen in the iconic map of the London transit system and the hidden realities of exclusion), and U.S. graft organ transplantation. This uniquely interdisciplinary work rewrites our understanding of the nature of moral stress, distress and injury, and ethics in modern life. Written accessibly and engagingly, it transforms how we think of ethics-personal and professional-amid the often conflicting moral injunctions across modern society. Copublished with Esri Press

In the first book to deal with the geriatric decline connected to non-terminal illness in old age, Tom Koch takes a sensitive but thorough look at the declining years of his father. The book is a narrative record of an elderly man unable to accept the physical realities of his state. Because it is told by the patient's caregiver, a son, it also chronicles the issues and mechanics of the aging child's role in caring for a parent. Koch defines aging as more than a series of physical symptoms and places the issues of caring and aging within the perspective of socially accepted values; independence, social function, family dynamics, and financial worth. The patient, his physicians and nurses, family and friends all become ciphers in the code by which we define not only aging and the elderly, but time, history, and ourselves. Mirrored Lives offers a social document in which the case of one man and his last years becomes a symbol for all of us.
Koch provides not only a record of the non-terminal decline of an elderly individual--his father--but a perspective which defines the problems of gerontology in a social context. His experiences are a practical example of the psychological aspects of caregiving to the elderly parent and the geriatric decline that the parent experiences--decreased mobility, increasing senility. The book places the community's reactions to the elderly's problems in a social context. Thus, aging is defined as a multigenerational issue, not something which just happens to the patient. Anyone faced with the care and support of an elderly loved one will find Mirrored Lives a thoughtful and sensitive study.

Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents

Social Sciences

Praeger Pub Text

This is a book about the news--the way it is written and the forms it takes. It examines the relation between the content of public information and the potential affect of new technologies on the degree and type of information available in the public forum. Tom Koch uses concrete, casebook examples to demonstrate the degree to which news information can be changed through the efficient and cost effective application of online bibliographic resources accessed by personal computers.
Koch argues that new, computer-based technologies will revolutionize news and public information by fundamentally altering the relation between writer and news subject. He shows how electronic databases, by making enormous amounts of data on virtually every subject available to the news writer or editor, have changed the equation which has defined news since at least the 1920s. To make clear the degree to which these systems will transform news, the author demonstrates how online resources can be used efficiently and inexpensively by generalists. Practical issues of online use are presented within the context of both the parameters of contemporary journalism and the means by which these technologies address its limits. Two separate chapters, one describing search technologies and the other reviewing database organization will be of practical value to both neophyte and journeyman news and public information writers alike. Using examples from his own and other's work, Koch demonstrates ways to carry out simple and inexpensive searches. His book will be especially important to the news or research librarian, reporter, and the public information or public relations writer.

Journalism for the 21st Century: Online Information, Electronic Databases, and the News

Business & Money

Praeger

A Place in Time tells the personal stories of normal people--grandchildren, children, and spouses--who have chosen to care for their aging and fragile relations. In a style reminiscent of Studs Terkel's, Tom Koch has collected these extraordinary narratives on the front lines of the battle for senior care. From Toronto, Canada, to Honolulu, Hawaii, he has met with, listened to, and recorded the experiences of an extraordinary group of people who care for ailing senior relatives at home. This is what it is like, they say, to be with and to love another who is simultaneously old and ill.
Like Oliver Sacks, the author then uses his collection to ask: What can we learn from the experiences of others? What can these frank and intimate stories teach us all? At a time when elder care is an increasingly important political and social issue, his conclusions are startling, radical, and important. These stories insist that, contrary to popular opinion, caregiving is not so much a debilitating and hateful task as it is the inevitable result of looking at the world in a way that is healthy and sane. These are tales of wellness, the author argues, not of despair. They are descriptions of a way of being in the world which is healthy, powerful, natural and good. A Place in Time provides vital and practical information for anyone considering physically caring for another. It will be of critical importance to gerontologists, ethicists, those in the medical and nursing professions, and everyone interested in family issues, the problems of the elderly, and caregiving.

A Place in Time: Care Givers for Their Elderly

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KOCH, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by KOCH, Tom

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KOCH, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wreck of the William Brown : A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea

The Wreck of the William Brown: A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea

Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground

Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine (Basic Bioethics)

Ethics in Everyday Places: Mapping Moral Stress, Distress, and Injury (Basic Bioethics)

Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine (Basic Bioethics)

Ethics in Everyday Places: Mapping Moral Stress, Distress, and Injury (Basic Bioethics)

Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents

Journalism for the 21st Century: Online Information, Electronic Databases, and the News

A Place in Time: Care Givers for Their Elderly