Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen – r... Let's not beat around the bush. This is an extraordinary book. David Quammen has woven a story of incredible complexity; a detective story with a difference, with a host of murderers – all of them real. They are viruses, bacteria and single-celled organisms which infect other animals, but every now and then make the jump – spill over – to our own species. Each chapter follows the quest to track down a new villain. An international team of detectives works on the cases, and Quammen follows them as they uncover the traces which will lead them to the killers. After an opening chapter about a horrific virus which lays low horses and humans, the Ebola virus emerges through a dark tale, with piles of dead gorillas in the forest, consumption of rotting bushmeat, sorcery and Rosicrucianism.
In each chapter a disease gradually comes into focus, starting with rumours, a few seemingly unconnected, mysterious deaths. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen. The next big and murderous human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease--new to humans, anyway. The bug that's responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won't come from outer space. Odds are that the killer pathogen--most likely a virus--will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal. Spillover is a work of science reporting, history, and travel, tracking this subject around the world.
For five years, I shadowed scientists into the field--a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, a suburban woodland in Duchess County, New York-and through their high-biosecurity laboratories. From what innocent creature, in what remote landscape, will the Next Big One emerge? The subject raises urgent questions.
Read David's OpEds: Ebola and the New Isolationism, Time Inc., October 6, 2014 Ebola Virus: A Grim, African Reality, New York Times, April 9, 2014. David Quammen fiction and non-fictions science writer. Author of Spillover: A... Nell Zink (Author of The Wallcreeper) Born in California in 1964, Nell Zink was raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in her second novel, Mislaid. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary. In 1993, while living in West Philadelphia, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997. Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. She moved to Germany in May 2000, completing a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen.
After 15 years writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franze Born in California in 1964, Nell Zink was raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in her second novel, Mislaid. After 15 years writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen. In early 2012, Zink sent Franzen her collected manuscripts.
Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper – Dorothy. “Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn’t. I don’t know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists.
This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I’ve read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. Excerpts from The Wallcreeper are available in n+1 and at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading (where you can also learn how the book came to Dorothy). “Nell Zink’s heady and rambunctious debut novel . . . moves at breakneck speed . . .
“[A]n instrument of delight, an offering of kinship. “A strange, funny, super-engaging book.” bustle.