SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The Literary Journalism class at CSU, Sacramento will be discussing Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone, again Monday night after going through parts of the tome last week.
The Hot Zone is about the Ebola virus, sort of. It's also about the potential of the disease, human reactions and how close the world might have come to disaster.
It also ponders the question: Will the world face Ebola again?
And when.
Preston, a writer for The New Yorker magazine has written three books about viruses: The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer. But branched out with a recent book, called The Wild Trees about giant redwoods and sequoias. Sorry about that 'branched-out' pun.
The Cobra Event was fictional, but was so well-researched - and written - that it prompted President Bill Clinton to spend many millions of dollars to get the nation ready for the bio-terror scenario that Preston suggests could happen.
Preston was interviewed last year by Jon Stewart for the Daily Show. And like all Jon Stewart interviews, well worth watching.
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Wish I knew more about the subject of the other books to be able to comment and discuss them.
But I do know trees very well, and have visited a lot of trees mentioned by Richard Preston in The Wild Trees, which you pointed out.
Atlas Grove and Grove of Titans
Those are the groves in Preston's book. The ones that an "occassional bushwhacker" may have seen.
After seeing the groves and making several visits, I calculated that about 40,000 to 50,000 people have passed through the two groves from about 1930 to 1998, when the "Grove of Titans" was said to be "discovered".
Most visitors to the grove would have just passed through. But the groves are not nearly as free of visitors as Preston's writing connotes or denotes.
What I realized, is that Preston stretches truth to the limits in many places.
At least for the Redwood and Forest related book, it's apparent that Preston writes several sections so that readers put the book down with a whole different image in mind, than what is actual. More of a blown-up impression. Shock and awe writing may be a good way to describe it, where many parts are explained with superlatives.
Cheers,
M. D. Vaden of Oregon
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