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Title: The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston, James Naughton ISBN: 0-375-41953-5 Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 5 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (74 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Chilling Mastery, A Horrific Threat...
Comment: Since I initially read and reviewed THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER back in November 2002, the specter of war in Iraq has continued to spotlight just how prophetic Preston's work is. Yet, as I've mentioned in radio and television interviews on my own novel of bioterrorism, the untold story of this horrific subject remains the distinct possibility that the current smallpox vaccine may not be effective against the bioengineered strain of variola most likely in the hands of rogue nations and, potentially, terrorist groups.
We are indeed in danger of experienceing the final epidemic.
This, despite the fact that Richard Preston detailed the danger of an engineered smallpox strain (most likely, a legacy of the massive Soviet bioweapon program) in DEMON.
In the eleven months I spent researching my novel of bioterrorism, ..., I interviewed dozens of experts in biological weapons, terrorism and medicine.
And everywhere I went, I found myself following the footprints of Richard Preston, whose knowledge and professionalism sets the standard in writing about this dark subject. Preston's a hard act to follow-- particularly so because his latest book, The Demon In The Freezer, is all so terribly true.
Written in an episodic style, the book has the feel of a journal, albeit one written by a man quietly horrified by the revelations he records.
The book centers around the high probability --so high as to constitute a virtual certainity-- of what itself is a horrifying fact: that the variola virus --smallpox, history's greatest mass murderer of humanity-- has come back from its official eradication as a disease in the mid-'70s to emerge today as a biological weapon possessed by a number of rogue states (most likely among them, Iraq) and potentially accessable to fanatical terrorists driven by a hatred of Western society.
Preston builds his case through a narrative based on interviews with experts --perhaps the most disturbing, an almost pastoral description of a meeting between Ken Alibeck (who defected from the Soviet bioweapon program, which produced weaponized smallpox by the metric ton and for whom Alibeck invented a particularly lethal variant of anthrax) and former U.S. biowarrior Bill Patrick at the latter's Maryland home. Here, Preston records how the pair chat about mega-death and the ease of bioweapon delivery, even to the point of Patrick using a mundane garden sprayer to send a plume of simulated bio-agent into the gentle breeze, which he posits will carry it to a major urban center within hours. In my other reviews on this subject (Alibeck's BIOHAZARD, for instance) I've already expressed my jaw-dropping astonishment at the appallingly casual attitude so often in evidence among the former high priests of biowarfare. Never has it been portrayed so revealingly as it is in Preston's account.
But anthrax, lethal though it may be, is incapable of human-to-human contagion; as such, it becomes only a subnote in "Demon." Always, Preston returns to the real threat: the virtual certainity that a genetically-engineered version of smallpox has been developed-- a variant that is unaffected by any existing vaccine and which has been further tweaked to enhance its ability to kill. Not only does Preston tell us how this viral monster has probably been created, he lets us follow him to a modest laboratory. Here, a bio-geneticist allows Preston to participate in an almost-identical gene-splicing process involving mousepox virus, a cousin of smallpox.
A reasonably bright high-school student could do the same, if he had access to mousepox... or smallpox. The genie has indeed escaped the bottle, and awaits only a monster to make the first wish to bring on the Final Epidemic of our nightmares.
"The Demon In The Freezer" recounts a mounting litany of horror, phrased in Preston's always calm style, and includes the author's own reaction to such events as the World Trade Center attacks, the subsequent anthrax-in-the-mail terrorism, even to today's probability of war in Iraq.
And then the book ends, as abruptly as a sharp intake of breath.
Wisely, Preston does not attempt a profound summation, for he had already known what his readers now realize. Doomsday viruses are in the hands of the ruthless and possibly the insane; the survival of humanity teeters in tentative balance.
As we wait, in a justified fear Preston has documented so well.
--Earl Merkel
Author
Rating: 5
Summary: Biowarfare: Incalculably Worse than the Nuclear Genie
Comment: People said of the first A-tests toward the close of the second world war that the "nuclear genie" had been let out of its bottle, words proved prophetic as in coming years the world raced toward nuclear armageddon. Yet today the nuclear genie is largely bottled thanks to the end of the Cold War, only to be supplanted by the wilder and unfortunately more accessible "poor man's" weapons of biowarfare.
Richard Preston, the author of the book that introduced western society at large to the threat of Ebola (The Hot Zone), presents a tale many times more chilling than his previous work as he delves into the threat lurking ostensibly in only two locations on earth: smallpox.
Preston's nonfiction reads better than many novels, and the reader will be hard-pressed to put down this page turner. The content will frighten all but fools--particularly the descriptions as to the ease of militarizing the world's greatest scourge into a vaccine resistant pandora's box demon. Though most of the tale is set between the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the present, he explores the days of the Eradication to describe the methodology (and set up its limitations) that rid the world of smallpox and to describe in chilling detail the effects of the disease.
If you thought Ebola was scary, smallpox will send you to cower in the corner as Preston details the ease of spread of the disease, where every infected person likely infects at least ten others--at times simply by being in the same building. Unlike the anthrax scare where only those exposed to the letters became ill, a smallpox attack could kill millions in mere weeks--and to believe that only the US and Russia maintain smallpox stores under strict security is a hope utterly dashed by Preston's account when he describes such recent finds as an amputated arm of a smallpox victim preserved in a dark University storeroom, or the forgotten personal stores of retired researchers at labs around the country--not to mention the bankrupt (financially and morally) Russian weapons program that to this day continues weapons work with smallpox.
His description of the ease of making vaccine-resistant smallpox reinforces the belief that we must work with the demon in the freezer to develop treatments and newer vaccines--the one in use today is the same as was used over 200 years ago. Read this book--just not alone at night; the smallpox demon makes Ebola look like a child's stuffed animal in comparison.
Rating: 4
Summary: Chilling Reality
Comment: If you think what you've heard on the news about smallpox is scary, you don't want to listen to this audiobook. Richard Preston provides a very detailed description of the varieties of smallpox & anthrax - its symptoms, disfigurements, and various paths to death-in highly graphic language. Preston argues that, to believe that smallbox is not held elsewhere is nonsense. A lot of time is spent on the the anthrax attacks of 2001. He believes that smallpox, which has killed more people than any other infectious disease, is the greatest biological threat facing humanity. Preston relates the history of smallpox from 1000 B.C. to the outbreaks in the 1970s. He goes into great detail about the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate it and the lost opportunity to destroy it forever. His final chapter introduces the idea of genetically modified smallpox that might be resistant not only to vaccines, but also to acquired immunity. The author draws readers into his narrative by humanizing his facts; researchers, WHO workers, and smallpox victims relay parts of this vivid and alarming story. This isn't something that you want to listen to on a full stomach.
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Title: The Cobra Event by Richard Preston ISBN: 0345409973 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 29 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Hot Zone : A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston ISBN: 0385479565 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 20 July, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It by Stephen Handelman, Ken Alibek ISBN: 0385334966 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 11 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Virus Hunter : Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World by Mark Olshaker, C.J. Peters ISBN: 0385485581 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 13 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett ISBN: 0140250913 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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