This book was gifted to me by a friend who warned: Don’t be put off by the cover. That’s good advice. The fang-baring baboon instantly gave me the impression that the book was going to have animals attacking people – rabid primates munching on unsuspecting children as they walk to school.
That’s not it at all. Bad cover, good book.
What Quammen describes in the book is how zoonotic viruses jump from animal populations to human hosts. He traces some very ominous diseases, such as the 1918 influenza – the Spanish Flu, Ebola, SARS, and Lyme disease. Let’s just take the Lyme disease example.
Deer ticks, right?
Yep, the reservoir host for Lyme disease is the poorly named deer tick. That has led people to cull the populations of deer in the wild for fear of their ticks. The problem for the deer, is that it’s relatively rare for these ticks to have anything to do with deer. Know what these ticks love? Rodents. Mice, voles, little scurrying critters that mostly hang out on the floor of the wooded areas that the ticks also love. Instead of culling the deer, people looking to stop the spread of Lyme disease, should be worrying about rodents.
Quammen published this book in 2012. I read it in 2020. He has a whole section on corona viruses and why we should, in 2012, have been worrying about them. He also writes about SARS, which also originated in Wuhan. Hmm…
It’s an easy read, Quammen is a great writer. It would have been a great idea for us all to spend our COVID downtime reading this book instead of arguing about masks.
It’s non-fiction, so it’s a little hard to evaluate it as a story, but the prose is strong and tight. The science is a solid 10, and is well documented in the notes and bibliography. Buy it here.