The Hot Zone Essays
3 samples in this category
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. It turns out that Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman haven’t even begun to tell the real story. For that you’ll have to go to Richard Preston’s riveting The Hot Zone, the book that started it all. Lurking beyond the bounds of Preston’s brilliant reportage are sobering, and compelling, questions about the...
3 Pages
1482 Words
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, I found myself looking through my bookshelves for a paperback copy of Richard Preston’s 1994 bestseller, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story. It’s worth noting that one of the bio-disaster movies that everyone seems to want to watch these days is 1995’s Outbreak, with Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo as government scientists trying to save the world from the fictitious “Motaba” virus. It was adapted from The Hot Zone. The Hot Zone, though, is...
3 Pages
1149 Words
The Hote Zone traces the true events surrounding an outbreak of the Ebola virus at a monkey facility in Reston, Virginia in the late 1980s. In order to contextualize the danger posed by this outbreak, Preston provides background about several other viral outbreaks, particularly in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The result is a fast-paced scientific thriller that, while lacking the traditional narrative of a fictional work, is all the more terrifying because it describes factual events. While Preston...
1 Page
659 Words
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