The Hot Zone

Big thanks to world-playground-deceit for recommending me this book in my guestbook! I read it over the weekend and wow, it was really good. I can draw many parallels to Rabies, but I think this book does everything better. They're actually quite similar in their bombastic nature, the feeling of impending doom and the kind of 80s american action movie vibe they give off. The pacing is amazing, and I found it very gripping and intense. Despite the book having many characters I hardly struggled with the amount of people involved (except somewhere around the latter half when all the army guys started being introduced one after another), which is worth giving props to considering this book is considerably shorter. The book is written in a very easy to grasp language, maybe even too simple, but I don't think it's necessarily a weakness. It was comfy to read.

This is a non-fiction fiction book about the emergence of Ebola up until the Reston event in 1990. It follows real events based on interviews of the people in the book, however it's not 100% accurate and there's some embellishing involved. Because of the time when it was written (1994), a lot of the info about the virus is very outdated and very speculative, so take the descriptions of ebola with a big grain of salt, and don't dismiss every big and scary statement made about it as fear mongering. Part of the panic being raised in this book is precisely because of the ignorance at that time, and the fact that people thought respiratory transmission of ebola was becoming a thing. The potential for Ebola to become the next plague was really there, and still kind of is. The reason why I'm saying all of this is because right before writing this paragraph, I had read a few reviews and a lot of them were recent and focusing on the fact that the book exaggerates and sensationalizes how ebola works. I think for the virus of this caliber, a lot of the "what-if" predictions were perfectly natural to make and more serve to remind us of how close we are to getting wiped out by a mutation of a single organism, to remind us of our mortality as a species... That kind of thing. I feel like a lot of people got a completely different impression than me though...

The book is divided into two sections I would say, the first one being a collection of stories that introduce us to different ebola strains and where and how they appeared, who was the index case and so on. This half was really fun to read, and honestly it had me wishing for more. I guess I need to dig into some more proper microbiology and virology nonfiction because I want to read more about the logistics, how the treatments worked and what people did to contain the outbreaks etc. It's crazy just how much luck plays a part in all of this. The second half is focused on the outbreak in Reston and how the army dealt with it. I enjoyed the insight into the grey area and the "we will do the illegal shit first and then ask for forgiveness" approach.

All in all this was a fun book, with disturbing and detailed descriptions of one of the most horrifying viruses, if you're not into that kind of thing and it causes you anxiety easily I suggest you skip it lmao.