Spillover by David Quammen

It feels good to get the reading year started with a science book. David Quammen has written some excellent science and nature essays in the past and I thought this book, his newest, would be a fun try at his longer work.

It did not disappoint.

The subject of the book is zoonosis, which is the transfer of a disease from animals to humans. Some of our most famous and deadliest diseases are zoonotic. Quammen travels the globe interviewing doctors, scientists, and patients who have either been infected with or worked with countless bacteria, viruses, or parasites. He chronicles malaria, hendra, hanta, ebola, SARS, flu, HIV, and others. It will definitely open your eyes to how susceptible we are to nature's cruelest bugs.

Quammen's writing style can be deep but also contains quick jabs that will spook you like a scene out of a horror film. You'll be reading fascinating pages about different forms of a virus, how it was isolated, the processes used to identify it, etc. and then all of a sudden he tells you a story about someone who got it and how it spread. The hair on the back of your neck stands up as the science gives way to the gruesome reality of these diseases.

The only part of the book I did not care for was a section he included in the HIV chapter. In it, he creates a sort of historical fiction of how the virus may have traveled from southeast Cameroon over a century ago into the Congo. It's pretty good fiction writing but I didn't feel like it meshed at all with the rest of the science writing in the book. It was kind of an outlier section that made you feel like the book was going in the wrong direction.

I learned a ton from this book. It helped dispel certain urban legends and pieces of misinformation about quite a few viruses. The chapter on SARS will keep you riveted and the chapter on HIV will make you proud of the hard-working scientists who traced HIV back over 100 years into Africa's past.

If you're into science and want something that will both pull back the curtain and scare you at the same time, I recommend this heartily.