Review: Preston, The Hot Zone

[truepenny]

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a terrific and also terrifying book about Ebola. It's severely out of date (1994), but is a great snapshot of the epidemiology of Ebola at that particular time. Preston is an amazing writer (much better than his more famous brother Douglas) and manages to write vivid and compelling descriptions of, for instance, putting on a bio-hazard suit.

Nothing that he says has been contradicted by Ebola's career since 1994.

This book is specifically about a dodged bullet: research monkeys shipped from the Philippines to Washington D.C. brought with them a strain of Ebola that, as it turns out, doesn't affect Homo sapiens. Or as Preston chillingly puts it, the disease knows the difference between humans and monkeys. Preston is a fantastic storyteller; he writes amazing exposition, both about the Army's work in containing Ebola Reston (this being before they knew it didn't affect humans) and about what was known about the provenance of Ebola and its filovirus "sisters." Even outdated as it is, I am hard-pressed to imagine someone writing a better book about Ebola.



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