David Quammen predicted the pandemic in ‘Spillover.’ His new book ‘Breathless’ tracks the race against COVID-19.
David Quammen was right.
That’ll be chiseled someday into his gravestone.
For much of 2020, the great contemporary science writer — whose career started in Chicago more than 50 years ago, in a quite different space — watched as his 2012 bestseller, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” went from science-driven prophesy to science reality. With eerily exacting details, he nailed how the pandemic would play out.
“Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus,” his latest, is the inevitable sequel no one asked for, so to speak. It’s an account of the scientists trying to get ahead of SARS-CoV-2, as well as the variants and innovations that came out of that race. As an early draft of ugly, ongoing history, it’s remarkably zeroed in on the science; though unremarkably, it’s inviting and accessible. Indeed, it’s up for the National Book Award.
Quammen, raised in Cincinnati, has been one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades, perfecting what writers like E.O. Wilson and Lewis Thomas started. Urban coyotes and smog, vegetarian piranha, mass extinction, cloning, molecular biology, the history of nutmeg, the upside of mosquitoes — Quammen has brought a
