cover image Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues--Out of the Present & Into the Future

Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues--Out of the Present & Into the Future

Frank Ryan. Little Brown and Company, $24.95 (448pp) ISBN 978-0-316-76383-7

The first half of Ryan's second book (after The Forgotten Plague, 1993) is a riveting nonfiction medical thriller packed with information. Ryan, a British physician, details the methodologies and personalities behind the investigations into some of the world's most deadly viral epidemics, including hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, Ebola fever and AIDS. The book's final nine chapters, however, are far less successful. In them, Ryan attempts to explain the ecological reasons for deadly outbreaks of plagues--but it quickly becomes apparent that he is not an ecologist. Not only does he subscribe to the outdated view of natural selection being red in tooth and claw, he fails to distinguish between process and outcome, referring to both natural selection and symbiosis as ""natural laws"" when, in fact, the latter comes about through the former. Additionally, he ventures over the poetic edge with such sentences as, ""viruses have, through the empirics of evolution, become unwitting knights of nature, armed by evolution for furious genomic attack against her transgressors."" The disappointing latter half of the book tarnishes but doesn't completely overshadow the earlier quality and excitement of what might have been another Hot Zone but isn't. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Feb.)