Via The New York Times, a review of Richard Preston's Crisis in the Red Zone: Can You Make a Page-Turning Thriller Out of the Ebola Crisis? As the author of nonfiction books, I can only say: better him than me. Excerpt:
Richard Preston has a penchant for the cinematic, even when his subject matter could not be more depressing and dire. His best-selling 1994 book, “The Hot Zone,” about an Ebola outbreak at a medical research facility in Reston, Va., was recently turned into a mini-series despite its reliance on hyperbole (as the science writer David Quammen rightly noted). His new book, “Crisis in the Red Zone,” falls into a similar trap. Covering the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, it also seems written with a singular intent: inspiring the movie version.
However one feels generally about the dramatic tone that Preston favors, it feels especially inappropriate in this book. The Reston strain of Ebola that was the focus of “The Hot Zone” was not harmful to humans — only other primates died. In contrast, more than 11,000 people died during the Ebola outbreak that is the focus of “Crisis in the Red Zone,” most of them in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
In Preston’s hands their lives and suffering often feel like little more than added color, heightened by his choice to end many of the book’s chapters with cliffhangers. One section ends with the well-worn image of a researcher looking ominously into a microscope.
Much like the clichés that are a regular feature of Hollywood films, the stereotypes that pile up in this book quickly become painful. A Frenchman is portrayed as being especially sad when a medical team is forced to leave behind a load of Camembert to make room for medical equipment. But it’s Preston’s portrayal of the nonwhite characters that feels especially egregious.
“The Kissi people of West Africa, who speak their own language and have their own traditions,” he writes — as though it’s unusual for people from any given culture to speak their own language and have their own traditions. He proceeds to launch into exhaustive detail, clearly meant to horrify, about the fact that the Kissi people eat bats. This is salient because it’s considered a possible source for Ebola entering humans. But Preston’s description of the bats as “stinky flying mice” seems designed to make us recoil in disgust over a custom we don’t understand.
His descriptions of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the people who live there, are so problematic in parts that I took to texting a friend snapshots of the most offending passages and asking her if a virus can be neocolonial. Despite their occasional use in germ warfare, viruses are neutral actors — but there’s nothing neutral about the portrayal of diseases and how we respond to them.
