Rating: 
Summary: The Demonâ?¦
Review: This is the sort of book that you just cannot put down. I started reading it on a long car ride home from Portland and was hooked immediately. After telling a co-worker that I had enjoyed Preston's “THE HOT ZONE†she recommended this book as a follow-up. While I did enjoy it, I found the chapters about Anthrax boring in comparisson to the terror of smallpox and the fascinating story of its eradication. “THE HOT ZONE†and Laurie Garrett's “THE COMING PLAGUE†(which I am currently in the middle of) are better, but this is an enjoyable read that is full of facts ot keep biology/pathology buffs hooked but not bogged down with technical jargon.
Rating:
Summary: The Demon⿦
Review: This is the sort of book that you just cannot put down. I started reading it on a long car ride home from Portland and was hooked immediately. After telling a co-worker that I had enjoyed Preston's “THE HOT ZONE†she recommended this book as a follow-up. While I did enjoy it, I found the chapters about Anthrax boring in comparisson to the terror of smallpox and the fascinating story of its eradication. “THE HOT ZONE†and Laurie Garrett's “THE COMING PLAGUE†(which I am currently in the middle of) are better, but this is an enjoyable read that is full of facts ot keep biology/pathology buffs hooked but not bogged down with technical jargon.
Rating: 
Summary: A Cytokine Storm
Review: Those of us who are old enough remember getting a shot in the arm when we were kids, a shot that made a huge sore that hurt like hell and left us with a quarter-sized scar that has stuck with us for life. These were our smallpox vaccinations, and for most of us, this was just another vaccination in a series of vaccinations we had to get because our parents made us. We later learned that entire American Indian populations had been wiped out by smallpox once the Europeans had introduced it to the new world. Smallpox hadn't existed in the Western Hemisphere before-Indians had no natural resistance to it-so they suffered horribly from the disease. This is what we were taught, but we were left with the impression that smallpox was really of little concern to us. We weren't taught that smallpox had been a devastating scourge of mankind for thousands of years, and that for many, contracting smallpox meant a slow, painful death.
Richard Preston has written another great biological who-done-it in the same swift, hard-hitting style of The Hot Zone. The Demon in the Freezer is constructed like a suspense novel; it reads very well, and the story moves along at a good clip while exposing or documenting the bio-warfare research surrounding smallpox. Anthrax and Ebola even make an appearance, their own stories prove to be disconcertingly woven within the smallpox saga.
In contrast to the Bio-weaponeers are the Eradicators, those teams of docs and biologists who stamped out smallpox in the 1970s. Their monumental work is all but forgotten by the lay public, and they never received any awards or prizes for their work. I think that one of Preston's main motivations for writing this book was probably to provide some recognition for the courage and determination of the Smallpox Eradication Teams. Their work has saved 2 million lives a year since the 1970s-they should at least have a lot of children named after them out there in the world.
Bacteria and viruses, bioengineering, weaponized strains, terrorists-this is really scary stuff, but I choose not to be afraid. If I ever come across one of these bio-weapons guys though, I'm going to [...].
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