The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind's Gravest Dangers
By: Ali Khan, William Patrick / Narrated By: Ben Sullivan
Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
Kinda good, kinda…. >Meh<
I think I’ve gotten a bit o’ Pandemic Overload from this listening as of late. Yep, I’d been in a Pandemic Kinda Mind for some time (Haven’t we all? How can we NOT be?!?), and I decided on doing only audiobooks this week that were aaaaaalllll about disease and death and chaos. You know, a little something to cheer up my Are We Sheltering in Place Again? Blues. Enter Ali S. Khan’s memoir about working with the CDC and the WHO on some of the world’s deadliest and most notorious plagues.
It opens jauntily enough with a young Khan paying his dues by looking for diarrhea causes on a cruise ship. There ain’t no glamour in that, but danged if he ain’t gonna go all “CSI” on everyone and figure out what’s making a plethora of passengers and shipmates ill and uncomfortable. And on it goes, one disease throughout the world after another, until we get to where we are today: The man knows his stuff, is respected like all get-out, and if he could juuuuuuust make things a tad more scintillating? This book would be a knockout.
Alas, it is not. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad. Noooooo, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that I think he could’ve referenced the TV show “CSI” less and maybe channeled some of the show’s drama and suspense. I mean, Khan gets into all sorts of scrapes; he’s in some pretty ravaged and wartorn countries, dodging rebels, handing papers over to child soldiers. I mean, that sounds pretty exciting, right? Uhm, not really. He’s more about getting into the science of transmission than in his daring escapes or boots-on-the-ground experiences. Still, ya learn a lot with this book, plus I’d just finished The Demon in the Freezer which wraps up the Anthrax attacks in the U.S. just after 9/11 in, what turns out to be, a misleading sorta conclusion. Khan, as this was published much later, has the real skinny on the Anthrax whodunnit, and I felt comPLETEly gratified with the information, satisfied with the conclusion, and bad for the guy who’s kinda sorta thrown under the bus in Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer. So huzzah for Ali S. Khan for that!!!
Also, you should know and be prepared that this guy is a true scientist, an expert. So don’t get all ticked off when the second part of the book starts bringing up global warming destroying habitats and leading to animals as reservoirs seeking new habitats, getting nearer to humans. If you can handle that the man knows what he’s talking about with all he’s seen and done with diseases the world over, you can just jolly well accept that perhaps he’s seen that global warming, climate change, is not a Liberal Leftist Hoax. The man has been in those jungles, he’s wiped spewed blood from his face, he knows what he’s seen. I say this cuz I’m always irked by reviews suddenly going south whenever a scientist “gets all political”.
ANYway—I don’t think much of all of this is helped by narrator Ben Sullivan. He has a really smooth tone which doesn’t help us feel the grit, gore, or excitement. And there’s just something awfully jaunty in his voice when he’s talking about blood oozing from victims’ orifices and the suffering involved. The tone of the text and the tone of the narration are at odds with each other is what I was feeling.
Oh I dunno, no disrespect to Khan meant, but I got more “swashbuckling” excitement from David Quammen’s Spillover which covered less ground but which had exciting on-the-scene escapades such as trapping wild and freaked out monkeys at a temple, trying to test them… all whilst not being absolutely obLITerated by them in the process. Quammen just wrote with a sense of awe and wonder which The Next Pandemic seems to be lacking.
A good book, yes! A great book?
Uhm, nope. Still, if “CSI” was still up and running, it’d have been nice for Khan to have been corralled as an expert in some Whodunnit or other. I’m sure it’d have tickled him pink!
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