But in fact, it offers not so much speculation as a confident prediction that there will be-there is in David Quammen’s mind no doubt about it-an outbreak of an infectious disease devastating to humans. Spillover is a history of the present and a speculation about our biological future. But it is the concept of unpredictability-the unpredictability of catastrophic global biological risk-that is at the heart of his book. Throughout his book the word risk rings like a bell. Designed to elicit fear and sell copies, it doesn’t resonate with the tone of the book whose purpose is to engender heightened understanding and informed concern. But ignore the threatening image of a crazed primate on the cover. Through the very accumulation of these stories, he shows us that these diseases are significantly on the increase.

He vividly illuminates the threat of diseases that are zoonotic- that spill over, jumping from animals to humans. He tells us about people who have died from these diseases and introduces us to people who have survived them, including scientists pursuing research and medical personnel caring for those who fell sick. He devotes the chapters of his book to outbreaks of specific diseases around the world-Hendra, Ebola, Lyme disease, and AIDS, among them, with influenza taken up primarily at the end. The foundational questions of Spillover are these: Where do these diseases come from? Can they be predicted? Why do they subside? Drawing on the conventions of the detective story and citing academic research, Quammen explains the science in an intelligible voice, patiently introducing us to vocabulary I suspect is unknown to most of his readers (reassortment, reservoir hosts, anthroponosis).

Where can we turn for an informed and compelling perspective on what will almost surely become a pandemic? I recommend science writer David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, a book written for a broad public that was published in 2012. As I write this, the New York Times reports that in China deaths from the coronavirus-named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization-have reached at least 1113, with the number of cases confirmed rising to 44,653. The numbers have mounted every day since China first began announcing them.

Spillover by David Quammen