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4.42 AVERAGE
4.42 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
Really long but well worth it. Discusses a range of viruses that cross from animals to humans, including SARS, Ebola and HIV/AIDS. Entertaining to read as the author visited and spoke to so many people, so the human element is colourful, but it is also highly informative. Not only teaches you about types of viruses and what they do (i.e. the flu and what the H and N stand for) but also a history of how they broke out into human society. Highly recommend.
adventurous
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
What a wonderfully written book about Zoonotic diseases (that spreads from animals to humans). It covers the entire history of viruses from their beginning to how thet came into limelight and journey thereon to eradicate their existence by human. Although viruses are following their own ecological strategy that every being in this world follow i.e survival and reproduce.
Absolutely fantastic in terms of both research and narrative, par for the course with Quammen. I would kill to have his career.
I can't finish this one. It is very well written and the author handles all of the topics with care- including that of other animals. But, I can only listen to so many accounts of such things like research with horses purposefully infected with ebola and left convulsing on the ground without any care before I have to give up. I did attempt to listen to it and small spurts and take lots of breaks, but it is still too difficult, especially with the current state of things. If you are able to listen to this in a detached way and maybe don't have trauma around illness and animal abuse, the quarter of it that I read was very good and very informative. Maybe I will return to this someday.
I—like everyone else at this point in time—read Spillover in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Quammen doesn't talk just about coronaviruses; he traces a dozen zoonotic diseases from their animal origins through their human fatalities. He simultaneously weaves interesting narratives with understandable science.
It's truly phenomenal how prescient a number of predictions of his were. Bats and Chinese wet markets were both predicted as possible breeding grounds for the next pandemic. So to were a number of other possibilities he mentioned which have yet to materialize, but the fact that what we know about the current crisis is essentially laid out in plain text eight years ago is shocking. Mostly in that it was so foreseeable by most all virologists and yet somehow we were still unprepared as a nation and world.
View my best reviews and a collection of mental models at jasperburns.blog.
Ebola, SARS, HIV and more. This book has it all. It was a little long for the amount of retainable information I took away from it, but just exposure to all the stories helped me understand the nature of these diseases and how they are researched.
It's truly phenomenal how prescient a number of predictions of his were. Bats and Chinese wet markets were both predicted as possible breeding grounds for the next pandemic. So to were a number of other possibilities he mentioned which have yet to materialize, but the fact that what we know about the current crisis is essentially laid out in plain text eight years ago is shocking. Mostly in that it was so foreseeable by most all virologists and yet somehow we were still unprepared as a nation and world.
View my best reviews and a collection of mental models at jasperburns.blog.
Ebola, SARS, HIV and more. This book has it all. It was a little long for the amount of retainable information I took away from it, but just exposure to all the stories helped me understand the nature of these diseases and how they are researched.
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway, but had intended to read it anyways.
An excellent run-through of animal diseases that have affected humans in the past century, written in an engaging, approachable style that's informative but never tedious. Quammen is no prophet, but after reading this book it's hard not to see the next pandemic just over the horizon. Not just Covid-19 but the one after and the one after.
An excellent run-through of animal diseases that have affected humans in the past century, written in an engaging, approachable style that's informative but never tedious. Quammen is no prophet, but after reading this book it's hard not to see the next pandemic just over the horizon. Not just Covid-19 but the one after and the one after.
adventurous
informative
medium-paced