Maybe you should also read this exposé of all the dramatic exaggerations in that book. It’s kind of like if everything you know about sharks came from the movie Jaws — you’re a walking talking source of ignorance.
The Hot Zone, for me, is unfortunately one of those books that you read as a young person and think is amazing, only to revisit years later and see it as much more shallow and contrived, the characters one-dimensional and the plot predictable. The problem is that The Hot Zone is not just a young adult novel–it’s still presented and defended as an absolutely true story, especially by huge Preston fans who seem to populate comment threads everywhere. And now it looks like there will be a sequel. At least it should be good for a drinking game.
(OT) I cannot get into The Lounge, despite several tries. Is this some denial-of-service attack or ordinary software bugs in action?
I fink I am happy I don’t recall ever heading of this Hot Zone thingy. Unfortunately, I have heard of Jaws, and continue to loathe the director, cast, studio, author, and crew to this day as some of the most environmentally uninformed and destructive arseholes with a megaphone.
Wasn’t Richard Rhodes’ book, Deadly Feasts, about the “inevitable” coming plague of vCJD, another fear-mongering tome along the same lines?
I’ve never read The Hot Zone since it sounded too sensational, but I know a lot of people who have. It was even a recommended read when I was in college.
Ha! Everything I know about Ebola comes from watching Outbreak
As an alternative, I’d suggest David Quammen’s Spillover which came out a couple years ago, and covered Zoonosis in general, including Ebola and HIV. It does a good job of covering both the science without neglecting the toll on people of such diseases.
I always avoided The Hot Zone, as too scary. Wasn’t Outbreak a movie based on The Hot Zone? It too, I avoided; only say bits and pieces as promos for when it is shown on TV. There is a lot of discussion these days of movies “based on a true story” as being totally misleading. Even with that “blurb”, the movie is still FICTION, and “do NOT take this as documentary”.
Eeeeeeek! Gads, you would have to remind me of that…
Assuming I haven’t got my bizarro timewasters confused — this is the one with a fully-functional mobile biosafe laboratory (with the ability to find and produce vaccines in a matter of at most hours) in the hold of commercial airliner, isn’t it? — that ranks at around the same level of dross as the holely babbling or any of the current USAlientstani thugs.
The Ebola Wars: How genomics research can help contain the outbreak. This is an article in the October 27 New Yorker magazine. Excerpt below:
Having seen how my completely unaffected hospital in a completely unaffected city has reacted to the possibility that we might get an ebola case some day, maybe, all I can say is FSM help the next west African who enters the US with a bad cold.
@twas brillig #7
Wikipedia says it was the result of one of the film’s writers losing out when there was bidding over the film rights to the original “Crisis in the Hot Zone” article that eventually lead to the book. But they have yet to actually make a movie out of either one.
At least Outbreak was an explicitly fictional film, albeit so silly that it’s practically Alex Jones-level loony (martial law declared, engineered bioweapons, plans to firebomb an American town).
Nevertheless I still love Jaws, but I don’t see it as an accurate representation of sharks either.
What did they do? Ban cheese? Hire some pea(-brain)s?
It would probably be like this.
@13: Yeah, that does look pretty much like what they appear to be planning.
@13, What was that I just watched???
Wow. Just had to try over ten times to log in.
Anyway, I heard in a news report on ebola in the last day or two that The Hot Zone is now being made into a movie.
So you have that to look forward to.
I thought Contagion was a lot scarier than Outbreak. Maybe because it seemed a lot more plausible to my decidedly uninformed viewpoint when it comes to biology and disease. There was also a quietly horrific pallor to the entire movie that left me very uncomfortable for days afterwards.
blf: An excerpt from Monsters, Inc., a Pixar animated kids’ movie. The titular company exists in an alternate dimension occupied by creatures that resemble kids’ imaginary monsters. They believe that direct contact with human children is potentially fatal, but they need the screams of children to generate power for the entire dimension. (There are plot-points about almost everything in that last statement being at least slightly incorrect.) Scare-ers are sent through portals (that link to closet doors in the kids’ room–hence, monster in the closet) to elicit a frightened wail in a half-awake child. Artifacts from the human world are considered a contagion, so when the big furry guy brings a sock back, he has to go through a truly paranoid decontamination process.
freemage, Is that considered entertainment, or is it part of indoctrination into the thugs (sometimes known by various 1984-ish names, such as “gop”)?
That said, Preston’s book of essays “Panic At Level 5” was quite good.
The Army hospital here in San Antonio is having its annual emergency preparedness drill, so the army has turned it into an Ebola preparedness drill. I just heard on the news that the CDC is sending a team to participate that will then be on call if and when there is another case at a hospital anywhere in the US.
Anything will be better than the response of that Dallas hospital.
BTW, to blf – Monsters, Inc is a very cute Disney film. I’ve seen it many, many, many times with the grandchildren. It’s one of those clever films with some adult humor that goes right over the heads of the little ones.
I read it and found it fascinating. It was definitely a jumping off place for actual science based books about viruses. I had another I don’t remember the name of (might have been just called Ebola) but I thought it was written by an actual doctor during the 1976? outbreak in Zaire. I recalled that being more interesting.
Outbreak was a blast don’t you all remember the beautifully heartbreaking scene with the little girl and the monkey? Or what about when the doctor finds the hole in her suit. Or when Hoffman’s character rips off his suit so they will die together. *weeps* Such fine film making there. Yikes, I remember way too much of that movie.
magistramarla, You could easily be correct about the Monsters Inc movie. I’ve obviously never seen it or even heard of it, but the linked-to clip struck me as so obviously a unfunny “parody” of “moonbats” running around for no obvious reason and then doing something expensive and pointless that it still seems more like an excerpt from a thugs’s indoctrination than part of a carefully-crafted bit of entertainment.
I understand the sentiment towards Preston’s book, but I think we sometimes forget how inaccessible reliable medical and scientific literature can be to the average citizen. “The Hot Zone” isn’t simply sensationalist tripe, it’s also widely available and surprisingly digestible. I’m sure this is old hat to the folks here who do work in academic science, but part of the reason popular “science” sells is because real scientific literature is either prohibitively expensive or too technical to hold the interest of a layperson.
I’m not defending Preston’s loose relationship with reality, or his shameless deployment of fear-inducing vignettes, but I do find it difficult to blame people who trusted him when his account of the Marburg and Ebola outbreaks was the only one readily available to them.
And if you think Preston’s shit is bad, don’t look here.
birgerjohansson @1
I’ve had a couple of “server down” messages in the last day or so, but not being unable to get into any given thread.
blf @2
Seconded.
I remember reading this book when I was in junior high when it first came out. I thought it was really interesting and understood he was saying the virus was almost definitely transmitted via aerosolization via cleaning methods. I personally think that book has given me the critical thinking skills about Ebola that I understand how not a big deal it is, at least at this moment, for Americans. I knew it was sensationalized at age 13 (I think). He also put forward the scenarios of possibly airborne versions of Ebola, though I seem to remember him saying that the virus is so big it likely will never become airborne. That may have come from some of the other infectious disease books I read around the same time.
Laaurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague came out just after the Hot Zone. And was a much better assessment of the risks. These days as it turns out I work just about a block away from that animal lab. Which is now a day care btw.
blf @ 2: I understand that, but Peter Benchley did end up regretting having written JAWS later, having had opportunities to swim with sharks and learn more about them, and then seeing the massive hunting of sharks that was, in part, fueled by his work. He wrote a great book called “Shark Trouble” that is all about how interesting and awesome and essential sharks really are, and gave a good overview of different sharks, which ones could potentially pose a danger to humans, but also emphasized that most, if not all, attacks on humans are mistakes. He even has a chapter on swimming safely in the ocean, in which he also emphasizes that when you enter the water you are in their domain and not your own, and that we all need to understand and respect that.
A bit OT, so I’m sorry, and I won’t keep talking, but I just wanted to give a bit more information on a man who wrote a ridiculous and sensational book as a last-ditch effort to stay alive as a writer, had no idea what would come of it (neither the fame and fortune nor the movie nor the demoniziation that would be used as justification to make a magnificent animal extinct), and ended up working to raise factual awareness of sharks almost as a penance. And Shark Trouble is a pretty good book to give anyone–interesting and informative, but with widely accessible writing.