Spillover
By: David Quammen / Narrated By: Jonathan Yen
Length: 20 hrs and 47 mins
Hunting for the Next Big One… or is it here…? Or do we have even more in our future…? GREAT Book!
Okay, so like, even before this whole obscene hoopla going with coronavirus—COVID-19, I’d been kinda sorta a freak about pandemic and plague audiobooks. Trust me, you do a little innocent snooping into The Black Death and WHAM! You’re stuck for life wondering and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And no matter what book I’ve listened to, no matter which expert writes it, all the books come down to: It’s not a matter of IF the Next Big One (NBO) will occur, it’s WHEN…
So it is with David Quammen’s magNIFicent Spillover which is not toooo terribly narrated by Jonathan Yen (NOT my favorite narrator!). While it goes into a plethora of viruses from the past that cause all sorts of disease, mayhem, and chaos, it always swings around and asks if we’re ready for the NBO (And pretty much all of the experts and disease hunters he works with along the way ominously bring it up too). I guess this would be a trifle annoying by the end (Or by Now considering Quammen’s is by no means the first virus/plague book I’ve hit since the pandemic began rearing its hideous head), but gosh darn it if Quammen isn’t a masterful storyteller to go along with his science and book smarts. Whereas other books hype up the fear factor of the upcoming unknown, Quammen simply folds it all into the stories he’s trying to tell. And while most of these stories of epidemics and death are rather unfortunate exercises in all that is hopeless, I didn’t feel this to be a hopeless or hair-raisingly uber anxiety producing work, despite some of its gory depictions of suffering and death.
Plus, Quammen made aaaaall of it seem, not so much documentation of despair but rather adventurous and even downright funny. Tell me if trapping monkeys, swirling, seething, swarming monkeys, in a closet-sized mesh cage at a temple, then knocking them out via injections to swinging and thrashing arms and legs, then duffle-bagging ‘em up and slurping blood samples from ‘em, all whilst pandemonium reigns, is NOT laugh out loud funny! Cuz Quammen, along for the ride, is most CERtainly the amateur in the bunch and he’d muuuuuch rather maintain his skin whole and intact and withOUT Herpes B-ridden infections festering in wounds. Then too, we find him as he is shown just exactly where the first recorded sample of HIV/AIDS was stored, and it’s like the little schoolboy in him bursts forth and he can’t get enough of digging through everything: TOTAL kid in a candy shop many a time throughout the book. Doesn’t matter if he’s learning of how many ticks are found on a shrew or that he was thaaaaaat close on one of his journeys to where HIV/AIDS may’ve started, the man is exuberance personified.
While the book opens with horrible and agonized deaths amongst horses who contracted the Hendra Virus in Australia, Quammen goes on to cover pretty much every well-known, and some not so well-known, diseases and outbreaks through history and up until publication in 2012. Then too, we get info on Lyme disease and malaria, not normally able to be lumped in with animal spillover as they come from naughty naughty insects, but Quammen makes enticing arguments for including them here; not to mention? If he’s writing about it, it’s FAScinating. At over 20+ hours, one would think I’d have had enough just with viruses, but no: I wanted to hear it all, even if it WAS with Jonathan Yen narrating…
….Which brings me to Jonathan “Not-M’-Favorite” Yen… The man’s hypnosis-robo voice usually has me irritated at first then conking out into a doleful snooze the next. I dunno, but maybe it was the awesome writing, or maybe it was that Yen seemed faaaaar more enthusiastic here than in other audiobooks I have of him, but at no point was I anywhere neeeeear nodding off. I did, however, check out reviewer ratings for him, wondering if I’m the only one who flies into a snit when they see: Jonathan Yen, and it turns out that many people, tho’ they found him sounding confident and such all, dinged him soundly for blustering his way through French and Chinese names and words, and also for fumbling scientific terminology big time. I didn’t catch this as I’m an ignorant git who knows only English and would find my own self fumbling through scientific terminology should I read it. But apparently listening to it all marred and mangled was incredibly jarring for a lot of people so be prepared, if you’re In The Know with French, Chinese, tech jargon, you might be wincing horribly and wishing to reach your hands out to throttle he who maims the words.
But seriously, I didn’t have a big problem with him, so huzzah for that!
Fantastic book, engaging writing and, even though Quammen can drag a lot of the illnesses out, their history, their origins and such all, to the nth degree, at no point did I feel that the story of investigation and adventure dragged because of all that. Lots of science which was very well explained, good enough for this git of a layman, some truly interesting and intrepid researchers, plus a hero/heroine thrown in every now and again just to make it even more an AWEsome and captivating book.
Highly recommended in this era of Sheltering in Place, where you might want a bit of extra info on how it all works. And since it was published several years ago, with the NBO being spoken of, then actively hunted for, you’ll feel like you have some grand insight with all the 20/20 Hindsight we’ve got now.
But still, the way they all talk about the Next Big One? It sounds waaaay worse than what’s going on now, and with ecological devastation, human habits, global proximity? I dunno… Is there Something Worse coming in the future?
Oooooooh, just freaked m’self out….
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