The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Title: The Hot Zone
Author: Richard Preston
Published: March 14, 2012
Publisher: Anchor
Pages: 450
Genre: True Story, Disease
Review: library book
As the tropical wildernesses of the world are destroyed, previously unknown viruses that have lived for eons are entering human populations. The Hot Zone is the hair-raising story of how a strain of one such virus (even more infectious and horrible than HIV) showed up in 1989 in a Virginia laboratory--and of the efforts of a military bio-hazard SWAT team to identify the virus and prevent it from spreading. Soon to be a movie.
This book was recommended to me and I have to say I was impressed. I never knew we had an Ebola outbreak here within the United States back in the 1980's. I learned a lot of new things about Ebola and it is amazing how it was never pinpointed to the actually origin of what causes the Ebola virus. Just that it could possible be in a cave in Africa. Just like I honestly didn't know there was more than one strain, Ebola is a virus you never want and boy if it was ever out in the world it would cause so much devastation. Within the story we get first account from those that dealt with this outbreak and what they did to learn more about it and how they stopped it from spreading.
Reading about those that died from this virus was like wow that is not the way you want to go out in life. There was some paragraphs that could have been cut down as they really served no purpose within the book. One of them that comes to mind is Nancy and her daily life to the extend that we learn her father has cancer and what she feels. I think that stuff could have been omitted.
I have to say reading this book I so wished I would have read it when I was in high school, because well I may have looked into how I could have worked at the CDC. Their job is a very interesting one and scary.
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