This Just Read: The Hot Zone

On a recent trip, I finished my thriller (The Odessa File) and moved on to some non-fiction, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston. Ebola is in the news and I'm interested in good medical writing. I remember back in the early 1990s, when the book was published. I was working at a bookstore and was responsible for ordering the New York Times best-sellers. The Hot Zone was on our shelves for some time.

It's a largely-narrative tale of the initial outbreaks of Ebola in the 1970s and early attempts at treatment and containment. The main thrust of the book is the incident in Reston, Viginia, in 1983, when a company that sold monkeys for research was hit with a new strain of the virus.

The story follows the USAMRIID and CDC vets and researchers as they dealt with that particular event. There were fears of a general outbreak in the human population of Northern Virginia, but they never materialized. Several workers at the facility became infected, but this string of Ebola was, apparently, harmless to humans.

The book was fast paced and well written, but it's not a great medical/scientific non-fiction book. It's mostly told in narrative style, with little scientific background to inform the reader (mind you, when it was written, we didn't know much about Ebola--and still don't). There are disease books that I've found more informative (and more interesting), especially the excellent The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry and The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (about influenza and cholera, respectively).

Still, The Hot Zone was a good read for my trip.