This was a wonderfully written book and an eye-opening read. Highly informative and exceedingly interesting; Quammen excels at taking very complex science and making it both accessible to the lay person and engaging reading. His narrative on the course of AIDS is especially recommended reading!!

Best Nonfiction of 2012! Reads beautifullly. Facinating story of science trackign the wonder of the world of viruses. Great for book clubs or anyone interested in the future of homo sapiens.

Ignore the cover. This is NOT a scaremongering book. Obviously the book publisher chose a blurred photo of a baboon and a subtitle intended to titillate and sensationalize. Thankfully, the author does no such thing. This is science writing at its best. You will learn, for instance, why Ebola and Marburg virus are unlikely to ever pose a threat to you if you stay away from the droppings of certain African bats. You will also learn that, contrary to widespread misinformation, deer are not the culprits in spreading Lyme disease - field mice are. You will also learn why bird flu is perhaps the most likely source for a global pandemic, and most likely to originate around pigs, which can harbor both bird and human flu, allowing for recombinations to occur that could combine the transmissibility of human flu with the mortality rate of bird flu.

This book is on The Economist's top reads for 2012 and deservedly so. Although detailed and thorough, it is highly readable. The author's wry sense of humour offsets the truly horrifying descriptions of the effects of various zoonotic diseases, those passed from animals to humans. (Hint: stay away from bats!) The chapter on the source and history of HIV is particularly fascinating.

If you've been avoiding getting your flu shot, you do not want to read this book, in which science writer David Quammen describes some of the scariest diseases on earth -- including SARS, AIDS, and Ebola -- and discusses possible candidates for the NBO, or "Next Big One." And there will be one, Quammen predicts, due to an exponential increase in the (increasingly mobile and meat-eating) human population coupled with ongoing ecological devastation. And it will most likely result from "spillover," in which infectious diseases in animals are transmitted to humans, resulting in familiar maladies such as avian flu, as well as lesser-known (but no less virulent) scourges such as Nipah, Hendra, and Marburg. For another eye-opening journalistic work about epidemics, try Nathan Wolfe's The Viral Storm. Nature and Science newsletter December 2012 http://www.nextreads.com/Display2.aspx?SID=5acc8fc1-4e91-4ebe-906d-f8fc5e82a8e0&N=581853

This is a well-written book, and it is well-researched. Knowledge of biological sciences would help the reader appreciate some of the finer points.