Richard Preston
Richard Preston
Richard Prestonis a New Yorker writer and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on extensive background research and interviews...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 August 1954
CountryUnited States of America
cutting practice people
Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94)
soup way best-way
The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
character order circles
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.
kind obscenity extremes
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
fighting ebola years
You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
moving circles tree
Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)
life simple thinking
In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
math numbers landscape
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
motivation inspiration thinking
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.
wipe
Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.