Crisis in the Red Zone, Richard Preston
Crisis in the Red Zone, Richard Preston
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Crisis in the Red Zone
The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

Bestseller

Author: Richard Preston

Narrator: Ray Porter

Unabridged: 13 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/23/2019


Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013–2014 Ebola epidemic
 
“Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells is all true makes it all more terrifying.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction
 
From the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone, now a National Geographic original miniseries . . .

This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly fell ill and died. The ensuing global drama activated health professionals in North America, Europe, and Africa in a desperate race against time to contain the viral wildfire. By the end—as the virus mutated into its deadliest form, and spread farther and faster than ever before—30,000 people would be infected, and the dead would be spread across eight countries on three continents.

In this taut and suspenseful medical drama, Richard Preston deeply chronicles the pandemic, in which we saw for the first time the specter of Ebola jumping continents, crossing the Atlantic, and infecting people in America. Rich in characters and conflict—physical, emotional, and ethical—Crisis in the Red Zone is an immersion in one of the great public health calamities of our time.

Preston writes of doctors and nurses in the field putting their own lives on the line, of government bureaucrats and NGO administrators moving, often fitfully, to try to contain the outbreak, and of pharmaceutical companies racing to develop drugs to combat the virus. He also explores the charged ethical dilemma over who should and did receive the rare doses of an experimental treatment when they became available at the peak of the disaster.

Crisis in the Red Zone makes clear that the outbreak of 2013–2014 is a harbinger of further, more severe outbreaks, and of emerging viruses heretofore unimagined—in any country, on any continent. In our ever more interconnected world, with roads and towns cut deep into the jungles of equatorial Africa, viruses both familiar and undiscovered are being unleashed into more densely populated areas than ever before.  

The more we discover about the virosphere, the more we realize its deadly potential. Crisis in the Red Zone is an exquisitely timely book, a stark warning of viral outbreaks to come.

About The Author

Richard Preston is the bestselling author of The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, The Wild Trees, and the novel The Cobra Event. A writer for The New Yorker since 1985, Preston is the only nondoctor to have received the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Champion of Prevention Award. He also holds an award from the American Institute of Physics. Preston lives outside of New York City.Ray Porter is the multiple Earphones Award–winning and Audie-nominated narrator of audiobooks, such as The Second Life of Nick Mason. A veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he has also appeared in ArgoThe RunawaysSons of AnarchyJustifiedAlmost Famous, and many other TV and film productions.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Matthew

5+++++ stars – but proceed with caution! While I was kind of goofy with my status messages throughout this book, I would definitely say that was a defense mechanism. This book is very serious and very scary. Touted as a sequel to Preston’s enthralling book, The Hot Zone, this book is equally mesmeriz......more

A biomedical, microbiological and terrifying trip to tiny superpredators and some thoughts about how they may evolve and be (mis)used. The suffering of the populations of these countries is as unbelievable and the courage of the help workers who had to fight against fake news denying the existence o......more

Goodreads review by Yun

Crisis in the Red Zone tells of the horrific 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic that engulfed Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and eventually infected almost 30,000 people. While the virus stretched the financial and medical infrastructure of these three countries, the book focuses geographically on the Mak......more

Goodreads review by Bradley

I came into this book with both curiosity and some slight trepidation that it might not quite mesh with my current active interest in the Coronavirus. Different kinds of sickness, speed, and symptoms. Ebola is much more deadly, while Coronavirus had the potential to spread across the world and kill......more


Quotes

“Richard Preston’s red zone—beset by ethical, medical, and epidemiological quandaries—shows us at our worst and at our best. This is a story about people, not pathogens, but, even as Preston focuses on one group of clinicians, nurses, and scientists at an underresourced hospital in West Africa, he makes devastatingly clear the worldwide fragility of our public-health systems. Global inequities have epidemiological consequences. This chronicle is haunting, yet not without hope. In spare, gripping prose, he illuminates how our interlinked age can make for enormous vulnerability—but also resilience.”—Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law, New York University 

Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells is all true makes it all more terrifying, and there’s no one who could tell it better than Richard Preston.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History