As governments and corporations scramble to pull the plug on research that proves that they are poisoning our planet and rush to muzzle the scientists who dare to share their disturbing data, it seems the powerful have declared a war on science. Michael Riordon asks deep questions of bold scientists who defy the status quo including: an Indigenous biologist who integrates traditional knowledge and a trickster's wit; an engineering professor who exposes the myths and dangers of fracking; a forensic geneticist who traces children stolen by the military in El Salvador; a sociologist who investigates the lure and threat of mass surveillance; a radical psychologist who confronts psychiatry's dangerous power; and a young marine biologist who risks her career to defend science and democracy. Who controls science and at what cost to the earth and its inhabitants? Can we change? This is unspun science for dangerous times.

"An Unauthorized Biography of the World" explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions.
Michael Riordon has thirty years' experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories. The canvas is broad, the stakes are high: the battles for First Nations lands in Canada; environmental justice in Chicago; genocide in Peru; homeless people organizing in Cleveland; September 11/01, and after, in New York City; gay survivors of electroshock in Britain; the struggle to preserve a people's identity in Newfoundland; peasant resistance to a huge transnational gold mine in Turkey.

Traveling to thousand-year-old olive groves, besieged villages, refugee camps, checkpoints, and barracks, Michael Riordon talks with people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who fight violence and war through creative resistance. The region remains a symbol of instability fueled by violence and hatred, and this investigation enters into the heart of the dispute and offers a different perspective. The author uncovers the crises that stirred them to act, the risks they face in working for peace, and the small victories that sustain them. These stories of Israelis who refuse to see Palestinians as enemies and Palestinians who practice nonviolent resistance break all stereotypes. In the face of deepening conflict, this portrait of courageous grassroots action provides hope for a livable future and inspiration to peace activists in all nations.

Michael Riordan celebrates the survival of ordinary, extraordinary people whose experiences are rarely reflected in the media. These stories of courage and humour were gathered in the course of two years and 27,000 kilometres of travel, and some three hundred in-person conversations.