Petski, Denise (March 29, 2021). " 'The Hot Zone: Anthrax': Enrico Colantoni To Play Rudy Giuliani, Morgan Kelly Set To Recur In Nat Geo Series". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved June 18, 2021. Read this for the crystalline caves, mummified baby elephants if nothing else. Richard Preston is one of the few writers of nonfiction that tell their factual stories as if they were fairy tales. Dark ones. This guy could give Eric Larson a run for his money, he is that good. Still thinking it was fiction and by the wrong author, I spent years looking for copies of this book. Then I got all my misapprehensions corrected. I got and read a copy. Realizing it was not fiction, I read the scariest book. This was before many people had heard the word Ebola and before the nearly annual outbreaks including the recent one that brought a few cases to America. The book ends with a description of Preston’s own voyage to Kitum Cave, the source of one outbreak. He gives a vivid account of the many different species of animals that inhabit the cave, any one of which could have been the virus’s original host. (Since then, we have detected the Marburg virus in bat guano.) The more general point is that the animal world is full of germs, some of them potentially devastating. AIDS crossed over into humans in the same region, a disease that has claimed many millions of lives. What else is out there waiting for us?

THE HOT ZONE Richard Preston : Richard Preston : Free THE HOT ZONE Richard Preston : Richard Preston : Free

I read this book on the same days I was watching the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, which had a curious effect on me. Because, well, the TV show might be very creepy, but I have to say it is nothing compared to the horror of this book. A brave, dedicated soldier and scientist (trained as a veterinarian), and a woman in a male-dominated field, Nancy Jaax provides The Hot Zone with a compelling and relatable protagonist. A loving wife to Jerry… a b Metcalf, Mitch. "ShowBuzzDaily's Sunday 11.30.2021 Top 150 Cable Originals & Network Finals Updated". ShowBuzzDaily . Retrieved December 1, 2021. This book was terrifying and incredibly upsetting - especially because of how wild people are still acting during our current pandemic of Covid-19. Well, I'm glad I didn't read this when I was a kid, because Ebola is even more horrifying than my little 12 year old mind could have conceived. It's awful. And this book gets graphic. It's also informative, engaging, and most of all chilling. It didn't help that I was burning up with a fever the majority of the time I was reading the book, but EVEN STILL. You can't help but contemplate the very thin line we tread between the perception of our impenetrable safety and a viral outbreak that has the potential to wipe out humanity.

Ebola is for real scary stuff. It is a horrible way to die and compared with even other fatal diseases it is hard to describe without being dramatic. As thrilling as the novel Andromeda Strain was- knowing what Ebola can and does do, and what extremes are necessary to study it make for way more than edge of the seat reading. The monster has not been slain and the good guys at best can regain some control. The threat of a pandemic, whether from Ebola or otherwise, is always looming over us, and our way of life makes us extremely vulnerable to outbreaks. Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. I'm not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent." Also, in combination with the book 'The Coming Plague' by Laurie Garrett, with reading this I became convinced that our destruction as a species will come not at the tragedy of nuclear annihilation, which I had feared my entire conscious life... but instead through tiny, virulent microorganisms which will become eternally mutating flesh-eating death machines, ripping through our communities until there's nothing left but rotting jelly. I have felt much more relaxed about life since then.

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins

The final chapter chronicles the journey Preston makes to Kitum Cave. He paints a picture of vast space, muted swatches of color and ancient clay and stone. “The mountain seemed like an empty cathedral. I tried to imagine what it must have been like when herds of elephants could have been seen moving through a forest of podo trees as large as sequoias: only ten years ago, before the trouble, Mount Elgon had been one of the earth's crown jewels.” I read this book while on night watch in the Army. I was eating cheap red licorice at a frenzied pace while I read from sheer nerves. The idea of bleeding out through every bodily opening was terrifying.As of writing this summary, the world is in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the deadly virus rages on and we grapple with the loss of life, we can learn from looking to other disease outbreaks the world has seen previously. Dr. Shem Musoke, miraculously enough, begins to get better, and no one else falls ill. His blood is sent out to laboratories all over the world so that they can study the virus. One of the institutions to receive it is the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), also called the Institute.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston | Waterstones

An intern at USAMRIID who specializes in using the Institute’s super-powerful electron microscope, Geisbert takes the initial pictures that identify the Reston virus as Ebola. Like Peter Jahrling, he is potentially exposed to the… Galbraith, N. S. (1994). "Review of The Hot Zone". BMJ. 309 (6962): 1168–1169. doi: 10.1136/bmj.309.6962.1168a. JSTOR 29725319. S2CID 220184148. Robert Redford has departed 20th Century Fox's "Crisis in the Hot Zone" ". Variety. varietyultimate.com. August 15, 1994 . Retrieved March 1, 2015. In early 2021, following the announcement of a second season with a different story, Tony Goldwyn, [2] Daniel Dae Kim, [2] Harry Hamlin, [5] Dylan Baker, [5] Ian Colletti [6] Dawn Olivieri, [6] and Denyce Lawton [6] were announced as cast members.

UPDATE Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, a group of friends read this outstanding and terrifying work of nonfiction in March of 2020. Of course, I re-read it with them! It is obviously far more meaningful now in 2020 than it ever was before, but it will also hit you with how much governmental response to the risk of contagious illnesses has NOT changed since this real world incident occurred.