The Hot Zone

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.