8/3/11

The Hot Zone, pages 201-291 (end)

As I finish the book, I realize a few of its problems that have bothered me.

1. Its focus is unclear; that is, we begin the book with a man catching Marburg virus, and we end with the author returning to the Monkey House in Reston (home of Ebola Reston). In between we see outbreaks of a couple more viruses, read anecdotes of people who face a virus and live, and, shortly before the end, suddenly the author is traveling back to the Marburg man’s (Monet’s) probable site of contact to search for the virus. If the author is a scientist, that fact certainly did not come through earlier. What is he doing with a space suit in Kitum cave? The author periodically ponders the HIV virus, and, again at the end, attempts to pull together the different strains (pardon the pun) of the book. In the end, I’m not sure what the author’s purpose was (though a paragraph near the end shows some eloquence as the author notices that the viruses have emerged from wounded parts of the earth—suggesting that human greed has led to these problems).

2. The writing seems much more like a rough draft than a polished book. Besides the gaffs already mentioned in this journal (use of “you,” sentences that end with this.), the author is repetitious, not just with descriptions or facts, as already mentioned, but with sentence structures. For example, in a paragraph describing the “insertion” into the Monkey House, Preston writes: “The suits were orange…. The suit has a clear…. The suit is pressurized. Air pressure is…into the suit. This keeps the suit under.…” At some point, some teacher or editor should have told him “no two sentences start with the same word. Sure, a writer may use repetition as a rhetorical strategy, but here is no apparent strategy.

In brief, I am more informed about viruses than I was before I began this book, and I enjoyed the author’s occasional theorizing about the reasons the viruses have begun working on humans, the self-preserving personality of the viruses, and human nature in the face of such challenges. These passages, however, were few and far between. I wonder if Stephen King and/or Robert Redford read the entire book before writing his review of it, or perhaps the publisher took the comments from celebrities out of context for the book jacket.