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4.42 AVERAGE
4.42 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
More of a 4.5, but rounding up. An incredibly informational book that is written in as accessible a way as possible given the topic and the science involved. That said, it did take me significantly longer to finish that my usual reads — partly due to the focus it takes for a lay reader (even one with decent background in science and science writing) to understand the intricacies of the topics being discussed, and partly due to my choice to read it before bed and promptly doze off when my brain was done.
I did wish the topics in the book were a little more evenly distributed (Quammen spends a good chunk of the book on HIV and its origins, with good reason, but it could have been a book in and of itself), but he does a great job giving an overview of a good number and variety of diseases that can and have spilled over into humans.
This book is particularly timely for 2020, even having been written eight years ago, and drives home the fact that the spillovers that have already occurred are almost certainly not the last we'll see in our lifetimes, but that research is being done to understand these viruses and diseases and to understand what we can do to protect our communities and mitigate risk.
I did wish the topics in the book were a little more evenly distributed (Quammen spends a good chunk of the book on HIV and its origins, with good reason, but it could have been a book in and of itself), but he does a great job giving an overview of a good number and variety of diseases that can and have spilled over into humans.
This book is particularly timely for 2020, even having been written eight years ago, and drives home the fact that the spillovers that have already occurred are almost certainly not the last we'll see in our lifetimes, but that research is being done to understand these viruses and diseases and to understand what we can do to protect our communities and mitigate risk.
I don't know if there is a more prescient book for this particular moment in time. This is not a shock doctrine book. It's a thoroughly researched, extremely readable look at zoonotic (transmissible from animal to human) diseases. AIDS and Lyme are covered as well as Influenza, SARS, and of course, Coronavirus. This book was written in 2012.
It was chilling to read passages about Chinese wet markets where black market pangolin meat was sold. The markets were outlawed in the wake of SARS but reappeared soon after and the implication and understanding was there (even in 2012) that it was not a matter of if but when another zoonotic virus would jump from creature to human being.
The chapters on the historical study of AIDS were fascinating. Not in the same vein as "And the Band Played On" but more of an archaeological reconstruction of the strains of HIV themselves.
There are also some viruses I'd never heard of with really remarkable chapters. The passages on the Nipah virus were crazy. Same for Hendra.
I'd recommend this if you want context on the why of the Covid-19 pandemic or if you are interested in epidemiology in general.
I would not recommend this if you are a friend of bats. I never want to get near a bat again.
It was chilling to read passages about Chinese wet markets where black market pangolin meat was sold. The markets were outlawed in the wake of SARS but reappeared soon after and the implication and understanding was there (even in 2012) that it was not a matter of if but when another zoonotic virus would jump from creature to human being.
The chapters on the historical study of AIDS were fascinating. Not in the same vein as "And the Band Played On" but more of an archaeological reconstruction of the strains of HIV themselves.
There are also some viruses I'd never heard of with really remarkable chapters. The passages on the Nipah virus were crazy. Same for Hendra.
I'd recommend this if you want context on the why of the Covid-19 pandemic or if you are interested in epidemiology in general.
I would not recommend this if you are a friend of bats. I never want to get near a bat again.
Stunning. And scary. If you already thought that things like AIDS, SARS, Ebola and H1N1 influenza were worrisome, just wait until you know more about how they are transmitted.
David Quammen writes often about the impact we humans have on the other creatures we share the planet with, and how the damage that we do comes back to haunt us. If you have the stomach for it, Spillover is his most dramatic story yet of the destructive carnage we could unleash upon ourselves.
David Quammen writes often about the impact we humans have on the other creatures we share the planet with, and how the damage that we do comes back to haunt us. If you have the stomach for it, Spillover is his most dramatic story yet of the destructive carnage we could unleash upon ourselves.
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Fornisce le giuste informazioni anche ai "non addetti ai lavori" in maniera chiara e comprensibile, dando una panoramica esaustiva delle principali malattie trasmesse da animale a uomo.
Ovviamente il capitolo sulla SARS è quello che colpisce di più alla luce della pandemia di COVID.
E in sintesi, meglio non mangiare pipistrelli.
David Quammen published this fascinating, terrifying book a decade ago when the world had already fairly recently grappled with AIDS, Hong Kong flu, SARS, H1N1, Legionnaire’s diseases, Ebola, and Marburg, among others. All these viruses were zoonotic—that is, they emerged from animals into humans—and Quammen’s book sets out to distill the best scientific thought on how these little buggers adapt and change to successfully use the human body as a place to grow and mutate to sustain their survival. Quammen traces the biological detective work conducted on the part of epidemiologists and others to identify these zoonoses and understand the ways in which they jump from bats or rodents or chimps into humans. Parts of the book are like a disease-based travelogue, in which he visits the world’s scariest bat caves and gorilla nests to follow the science. He has an admirable knack of making complex science intelligible and even interesting. He wrote this book long before the current coronavirus, but he predicted there would be more. He speculates that human beings themselves constitute an outbreak, having doubled our population since 1969 and adding 1B every year since then (496). The sheer size of the human population means we are pushing into formerly unspoiled areas, coming into more and more intense contact with the animals that live there, changing the climate, and exhausting resources. But his goal is not to frighten the reader, but to point out that only human behavior can defend against the next mindless pandemic. “Individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd,” he writes (519). Our miserable bungling of the COVID-19 crisis, however, points to the ways in which self-preservation can fail. As I write this, since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, 96M cases have been diagnosed globally, with 1M dead (and those are the reported cases and deaths).
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Part of why this took me so long to read is because I truly wanted to savour it. A brilliant, eye-opening, bone-chilling read. It was published in 2012, so the chapter prophesying the return of coronaviruses was a fun "oh, shit" moment. If you're not scared to death about avian flu this year you probably should be! Can't recommend this highly enough.
"That's the salubrious thing about zoonotic diseases: They remind us, as St. Francis did, that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no 'natural world,' it's a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world. Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus - the one we haven't yet detected."
"That's the salubrious thing about zoonotic diseases: They remind us, as St. Francis did, that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no 'natural world,' it's a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world. Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus - the one we haven't yet detected."
Admittedly I did not read every chapter. It’s definitely a fascinating subject and well written. But not very fun