Noting its ability to jump from one primate species to another, he writes, 'It did not know boundaries. His description of one emerging virus, however, will illustrate Preston's way with words. Once you are infected with these viruses, Preston reports, vital organs such as your liver 'begin to liquify,' your skin 'bubbles up' into a rash 'likened to tapioca pudding,' and 'you may weep blood.' I will leave aside other details. There are paragraphs here that could of themselves produce cold sweats and shortness of breath. The monkeys, imported for research, arrived infected with a mysterious rain-forest virus thought to be the deadliest ever known - a virus, Richard Preston writes, that 'does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.' The Army's secret assault on the virus in December 1989, and the history of several earlier outbreaks of such viruses in Africa and Germany, are narrated with chilling, graphic detail in The Hot Zone, a book not meant for readers with faint hearts or weak stomachs. area had no idea they were being saved from the threat of a plague far worse than the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Army, in a morning rush-hour maneuver, moved from Fort Detrick, Maryland, to a small suburban mall in Reston, Virginia, to wipe out a colony of sick African monkeys housed there, people in the greater Washington, D.C. Lurking beyond the bounds of Preston's brilliant reportage are sobering, and compelling, questions about the nature of viruses and the research that is beginning to elucidate their mysteries. For that you'll have to go to Richard Preston's riveting The Hot Zone, the book that started it all.

It turns out that Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman haven't even begun to tell the real story. Just when you thought it was safe to ease out of your movie-theater seat and head home from a close encounter of the viral kind in Outbreak - wait.

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