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Summary: The Demon in the Freezer book review
Review: I really liked the book. As a fan of Richard Preston's books, I very much so enjoyed The Demon in the Freezer. Although it wasn't on the same level as The Hot Zone, I still found myself unable to put it down until the very end.
If you have read The Hot Zone and enjoyed that, you will most likely enjoy this book as well. I highly recommend it to anyone. And if you like this book I also suggest The Cobra Event.
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Summary: Smallpox non-fiction thriller!
Review: A fascinating treatise on smallpox, including its history and recent emergence as the virus of choice for bioterrorists. Smallpox came into existance only as human population densities swelled. In the late 18th century, Edward Jenner made history by performing the first successful smallpox vaccination. In the centuries that followed, humanity waged war against smallpox, and it was ostensibly eradicated from nature in the late seventies. It seems that mankind was too enamored with smallpox to destroy it completely, however, and it lives on in freezers around the world. "The Hot Zone", by the same author, made me paranoid about the ebola virus. Having finished this book, I know now that ebola is child's play compared to smallpox. "Demon" is full of loads of details about the biomedical industry, including a survey of modern practices, tools, techniques, and prominent players. The book is all the more terrifying given its non-fiction status. A must read for anybody interested in infectious diseases, smallpox, or bioweapons programs.
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Summary: Fascinating and Terrifying
Review: As a fan of medical mysteries, adventures, and horrors, I find none as terrifying as those based on fact. Richard Preston came through again with one of the most fascinating and thought provoking books I have read in a long time. I was not sure what to expect, as I had bought the book some time ago. When it started with a revisit of 9/11 and the anthrax scare, I was fairly disappointed, as I was looking for something along the lines of Ebola or the other hemmoragic fevers. However, the book quickly did a history of the team charged with erradicating smallpox, their trials, triumphs, and I was just blown away. Call me odd for being fascinated by smallpox, and other books of this sort, but when one realizes that these diseases occurred, real people died, and real people sought and sometimes found a cure, nothing can make for more interesting reading. I recommend all Preston and Preston/Child collaborations as 'intelligent' reading.
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Summary: A chilling and relevant look at bioweapons
Review: Demon in the Freezer is a chilling but important glimpse into the world of bioweapons. In the third book of his Dark Biology trilogy, Preston examines the histories of and threats presented by Anthrax and Smallpox. He writes in a style similar to that of the Hot Zone, breaking chapters into short vignettes that feature the people who work with these dangerous viruses.
Preston specifically examines the Anthrax attacks following September 11th and the possibility of smallpox being used as a biological weapon. He also traces the history of the eradication of smallpox and examines which countries might possess rogue samples of the virus. His writing remains detached, without falling into the trap of him presenting an apocalyptical world view. Instead Preston allows his interview subjects to voice their concern for him.
Like the Hot Zone, this book reads like a suspense novel and is made even more frightening because it is real. This is a great, entirely readable non-fiction thriller.
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Summary: Not great, but decent
Review: Demon in the Freezer is an interesting book about the history of smallpox and other ills of mankind. It does a good job of describing current biocontainment technology and other designs for biological weapons and the history of the U.S. - U.S.S.R. conflict that brought some of these weapons into being. Demon in the Freezer does fall a bit short in having a lot of characters (I began to lose track of them) and also tries unsuccessfully to be a "doomsday" kind of book. I finished reading this pleased with the amount that I had learned about smallpox, biocontainment, etc., but don't especially worry more about a smallpox epidemic than before. Demon in the Freezer paints of picture of a smallpox outbreak being so random and uncontrollable it is like worrying about being hit by an asteroid. There would be nothing that you could do so why worry? Other than that flaw, Demon in the Freezer is a good interesting factual book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
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Summary: Fantastic
Review: Great book by Richard Preston. The information contained is fascinating, frightening and informative. A great book - and a quick read.
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Summary: Biowarfare: Incalculably Worse than the Nuclear Genie
Review: People said of the first A-tests toward the close of the second world war that the "nuclear genie" had been let out of its bottle, words proved prophetic as in coming years the world raced toward nuclear armageddon. Yet today the nuclear genie is largely bottled thanks to the end of the Cold War, only to be supplanted by the wilder and unfortunately more accessible "poor man's" weapons of biowarfare. Richard Preston, the author of the book that introduced western society at large to the threat of Ebola (The Hot Zone), presents a tale many times more chilling than his previous work as he delves into the threat lurking ostensibly in only two locations on earth: smallpox. Preston's nonfiction reads better than many novels, and the reader will be hard-pressed to put down this page turner. The content will frighten all but fools--particularly the descriptions as to the ease of militarizing the world's greatest scourge into a vaccine resistant pandora's box demon. Though most of the tale is set between the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the present, he explores the days of the Eradication to describe the methodology (and set up its limitations) that rid the world of smallpox and to describe in chilling detail the effects of the disease. If you thought Ebola was scary, smallpox will send you to cower in the corner as Preston details the ease of spread of the disease, where every infected person likely infects at least ten others--at times simply by being in the same building. Unlike the anthrax scare where only those exposed to the letters became ill, a smallpox attack could kill millions in mere weeks--and to believe that only the US and Russia maintain smallpox stores under strict security is a hope utterly dashed by Preston's account when he describes such recent finds as an amputated arm of a smallpox victim preserved in a dark University storeroom, or the forgotten personal stores of retired researchers at labs around the country--not to mention the bankrupt (financially and morally) Russian weapons program that to this day continues weapons work with smallpox. His description of the ease of making vaccine-resistant smallpox reinforces the belief that we must work with the demon in the freezer to develop treatments and newer vaccines--the one in use today is the same as was used over 200 years ago. Read this book--just not alone at night; the smallpox demon makes Ebola look like a child's stuffed animal in comparison.
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Summary: Frightening
Review: Richard Preston has written a frightening book. Starting and ending with the Anthrax attacks on the United States. Preston has talked to many of the top bioweapons engineers in the world and his research shows in this outstanding book. Full of information from accross the world. The history of Smallpox, the eradication effort by the World Health Organization. The background on Anthrax. Side stories to Ebola. The most dangerous virus's in the world are addressed in this book. The book examines the threat of Smallpox and explains why most people in the know about infectious disease's still consider it the worst the world has ever seen, even worse than plague. The book touches on Biopreparat (for a more in depth look read Biohazard by Ken Alibek) and the Russian stockpiles of Smallpox that they have weaponized and put into missiles to attack other countries. The CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta still holds over 450 different strains of Smallpox. The book goes on to explain how many countries have Smallpox and this is not a little known fact. How genetic engineering could easily make Smallpox harder to contain than it already is. In today's world travel a Smallpox outbreak would mean hundreds of thousands of deaths and it would shut down international trade. it would bring the world to its knees. With 25 million people living within a couple hours travel of one another an outbreak in a third world county could show up in the United States in a few days. And this is not taking into account the possibility of a direct bioweapons attack on the United States. Before it was diagnosed, it would be spread around the world by air travel. This book is well written, reads easily, is full of information and very thought provoking. It was so engrossing that I started ready one night and did not want to put it down. I finished it the next afternoon. For a better understanding of what the world is facing today you should read this book. Smallpox is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than a nuclear war. Nuclear devastation is confined to the area of the bomb. Smallpox would travel person to person throughout the world. In a word, the information in this book is, frightening.
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Summary: Informative...
Review: The Demon in the Freezer is the informative and interesting tale of the eradication of smallpox. The book describes the techniques used to rid the world of this horrible disease and its eventual location in just two high security freezers worldwide. The reader is introduced to some of the most brilliant minds in science and reads about their reactions as their worst fears come true. It is revealed that smallpox, "the demon", may be present in more than two locations and if it were to be "set loose", its consequences would be devastating.
While The Demon is an informative book full of science and medical discovery, it includes too much unneeded description to be extraordinarily thrilling. Do we really need to know what color sweater Karl Heinz Richter was wearing on the 16th of January, 1970? Will that really add to our knowledge of bioweapons and scientific triumphs? No.
This book was meant to be a doomsday type of thriller. It was meant to make the reader think more about what is really going on around them. In reading this book, I did gain a great deal of knowledge about smallpox and other occurances in that area of science. However, I'm not necessarily more concerned with the prospects of it "getting loose" and killing everyone any more than I was before. I would suggest this book for anyone interested in the topics of medical science and biological weapons, however, this book is not necessarily for everyone.
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Summary: A slight down-grade, but nonetheless incredible
Review: The Demon in the Freezer is the third of Richard Preston's "Black Biology" books. It was his second non-fiction story involving bioterrorism and viruses. Although I have to admit that the Hot Zone was indeed a better book, I applaud Preston for his tremendous effort in writing The Demon in the Freezer. The book has a profusion of information regarding poxviruses and various sub-strains of this sub-microscopic killer. The book effectively intertwined biology, ethics, history, and war. The Demon in the Freezer, in a nutshell, is an interesting piece of work that should be read by all those who are uneducated in the field of global politics regarding bio-warfare.
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