The Hot Zone

The Terrifying True Story of how my middle school English teacher incited my first panic attack

Ebola is scary.

Read this many, many years ago. It was the first book about viruses I'd read other than the Andromeda Strain. It had a really profound effect on me. It's one of those books that I can still remember details of 20 years later. Shame the show was so poor, I was really looking forward to it.

The first 30 pages of this book comprise the most horrifying and stomach churning experience imaginable. Highly recommended.

Scary! But very interesting.

Finally, a good book this year. The Hot Zone was a delight. It was fascinating, terrifying, and kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Some things in this story are dramatized (having started ~some~ coursework in my major which literally has the word diseases in it I know this to be true), but I didn't see a problem in this. Preston is writing to both inform and entertain. Naturally, he will make some symptoms more severe than they may actually appear. Does it make his book Ebola any more deadlier than the actual virus? No. They are both going to kill you just the same. So I don't see a problem with this.The pacing is great. It's as good as the timeline I remember in [b:The Demon in the Freezer 198505 The Demon in the Freezer Richard Preston https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1172613042l/198505.SY75.jpg 192020]. You will not be bored at any point in this book.The only complaint I had was in the portrayal of Nancy Jaax. Nancy is a BAD*** and no one can change my mind. Preston could not stop bringing up this line about Jaax being a “married female” and thus would have to neglect either her job or children. Keeping in mind that this book is from the 90s, I'm frankly not shocked by this sexist comment that was made to Nancy in the first place. Lord knows it still happens today. But to bring it up time and time again was completely unnecessary. It was brought up seemingly every time Nancy put something in the microwave for her children's dinner. And most of the time, this was food that she had prepared on the weekend and froze for the week. Today, we call this meal prepping. Back then, it was apparently “neglecting the children”. My point is that this was something stupid to continue bringing up and didn't further the story in any way. Do better for your female scientists next time.

3.1/5 stars

I read this book pre-pandemic for English class. The teacher had warned us not to get too obsessed with the idea of possibly getting infected with the virus. Previously, some classes had some problems in gaining the fear of possibly getting infected. In my case, this wasn't a problem. I had different issues with the book itself. The book does a good job of keeping you interested and, at some points, on the edge of your seat, but the information provided within the book is rather inaccurate at times.

The author is more focused on inflicting fear than educating you on the topic of Ebola. I was introduced to this book in class as a way to get educated on the topic of Ebola, but it failed to do so. I did learn a bit more about what it causes to the body and where it spreads, but I'm sure there are other more informative books. I would recommend this to someone who wants to get more into the genre of medical horror.

Starts strong, ends strong, but I found my mind often wandering during the middle bits. This is a non-fiction account of 1980s Ebola outbreaks in the Congo and US (!), written in the style of a Michael Crichton techno-thriller.

The first chapter opens with an expat Frenchman living in the Congo who is Ebola Zaire's patient zero. His horrible, tragic death is described in gory, dare-I-say-loving-?! detail, and is not at all something you want to read or listen to around a meal time. The rest of the book varies between pop science explanations of filoviruses (such as Ebola and Marburg), and non-fic Crichton techno-thriller stuff about a group of CDC and military officials in Reston, VA, where - in the late 80s, apparently - a bunch of monkeys were accidentally imported “hot” with Ebola and (a small group of) people realized that, hoo shit, the world might end if we don't hose this place down with some serious bleach.

The book is at its best when it describes, with enormous passion, the cold, almost alien intelligence of viruses, and the way we human hosts are mere meat packages for these ruthless... beings? It's such a fresh, disconcerting way to think about viruses, and it forces you to think so deeply about viruses, that - for that - I give the book its 3 stars. But the whole process of how they dealt with the outbreak in Reston, which is described in very meticulous detail and features a wide, rotating cast of (forgettable? not dissimilar enough?) characters, oddly bored me.

Another anti-star was for the reader; I listened to this on audiobook, and the reader, Richard Davidson, had a very old-timey humorless journalist quality (think Leslie Nielsen) which sort of ruined the tone. Sometimes I realized that, had I read the sentence rather than heard the Leslie Nielsen version of it, I would have laughed or been struck or otherwise enjoyed it more. Instead, it all sounded so... ughh 1990s cheesy? Monotone? I dunno.

I recently got the itch to read more non-fiction to broaden my horizon and learn a thing or two. To start this off, I picked up this highly praised book. Why not start the journey to more knowledge with deadly viruses?

Of course I've followed the news and knew about Ebola and its symptoms and consequences. But I never really digged deeper into it. And boy it is as fascinating as it is terrifying.

Although based truly in facts and history, “The Hot Zone” is written like fiction which immensely helps to terrify you. It was really fascinating to learn about the place of birth of filoviruses and how they're adapting to survive. Preston describes in detail what happens to a human being and/or animal once it catches one of many different strings of filoviruses. If this would be a fiction book, many people would be appalled of the cruelty and brutality that happens to animals and humans. The fact that it isn't makes this story so haunting.

What can you learn from this book? Besides the story of the discovery of different deadly viruses and a look behind the scenes of scientific animal tests, you learn how hauntingly helpless we humans are if nature decides to get rid of us. We can battle it, but it's a fight against windmills. Nature can adapt and change and we will never know where it's going to strike next.

This book should have been 100 pages long. I made it through 150 and I feel like I know the whole story. Twice. The amazing events are almost destroyed by non-stop breathless writing. Breathless is good, but man. Breathless for 100 pages in a row is just exhausting.

Forget Stephen King or Dean Koontz. This stuff is SCARY! On top of that, it is real.