Until Proven Safe, Nicola Twilley
Until Proven Safe, Nicola Twilley
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Until Proven Safe
The History and Future of Quarantine

Author: Nicola Twilley, Geoff Manaugh

Narrator: Kristen DiMercurio

Unabridged: 10 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/20/2021


Synopsis

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have been researching quarantine since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Until Proven Safe, they bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent listening for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces–––biological, political, technological––that shape our modern world.

Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe.

Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus.

But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.

We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Until Proven Safe helps us make sense of our new reality through a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Nicola Twilley

NICOLA TWILLEY is co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and an award-winning contributor to The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.

About Geoff Manaugh

GEOFF MANAUGH is the author of the New York Times-bestseller A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alexandra on November 25, 2021

I like to imagine Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh saying "No one would have believed..." like Richard Burton at the start of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, when asked how they feel in 2021 about this book. They started it, as far as I can tell, many years before 2020... and then finished it wh......more

Goodreads review by Ula on July 09, 2021

Every crisis is an opportunity - it may be a cliché but it is certainly true in the case of this book. Global pandemic in 2020 made a seemingly obscure quarantine not only relevant but a hot topic. Thankfully, it is not a case of a hastily written volume intended to grab the spotlight. The authors w......more

Goodreads review by Katie on August 23, 2021

This nonfiction book about the global history of quarantine started before COVID and ended during, putting the authors in the unusual position of unwillingly experiencing what they were writing about (and in the enviable position of striking book gold--probably increasing sales dramatically because......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on May 02, 2024

Thanks to very recent history, we are all now familiar with quarantine, at least on some level. Sure, it means more than being locked away with your dwindling supply of Charmin and a year's worth of PopTarts. In this well-researched book, Nicola Twilley takes us through the history of quarantine, fr......more

Goodreads review by Camille on March 21, 2022

I thought this topic was timely and the authors did a good job of demonstrating all the different circumstances when we rely on quarantine - not just for human disease, but for invasive species, plant disease, unknown extraterrestrial matter, and nuclear waste. However, I thought maybe they made th......more


Awards

  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
  • NPR Best Book of the Year
  • Financial Times Books of the Year
  • The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year