David Quammen’s ‘Spillover’ Owes Much to Faulkner

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, October 20, 2012

David Quammen’s ‘Spillover’ Owes Much to Faulkner

By CHARLES McGRATH

“Don’t have the monkey,” David Quammen said before lunch the other day at Casa Mono, a Catalan restaurant on Irving Place in Manhattan. “Or if you do, order it medium-well.”

There was a haunch of some strange salted and air-cured mammal on the bar, but despite the restaurant’s name (Casa Mono means Monkey House in Spanish), there is no monkey on the menu, and a good thing too. As Mr. Quammen points out in his scary but hard-to-put-down new book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” eating tainted chimpanzee meat is a good way to come down with the Ebola virus.

Ebola is just one of many horrific diseases that turn up in “Spillover.” Some of the others are SARS, AIDS, bubonic plague, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg virus, swine flu, bird flu and Hendra virus, or horse measles. What they have in common is that they are all zoonoses — animal infections that jump over into humans — and the book’s unsettling thesis is that such crossovers are bound to happen with more frequency, and possibly greater virulence, as people increasingly encroach on formerly wild and undisturbed habitats.

“We’re shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren’t very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal,” Mr. Quammen said. “We introduce them into a new, rich habitat called the human population, where they can flourish more abundantly and cause more trouble.”

Mr. Quammen, who is 64 but looks much younger, grew up in Cincinnati but has lived for the last 40 years in Montana. He is wiry and tanned, and though Dwight Garner, reviewing “Spillover” in The Times, called him “not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period,” you could easily mistake him for a fishing guide or a field biologist. “Spillover,” which took Mr. Quammen some 12 years to write, has chapters on virology, scientific history, even on math, but in most of the book he is not just in the lab or the library but also in remote locations all over Central Africa, Malaysia and China. He loves arduous travel, he said over lunch, and he enjoys the company of adventurous scientists.

In the book some of them become as vivid as characters in a Michael Crichton scientific thriller, or as obsessed as the questers in a Rider Haggard novel, only in search of pathogens instead of buried treasure.

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