Richard Preston

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The canopy voyagers are young just college students when they start their quest and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there's nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called "fire caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one's death. Preston's account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists' passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees the story of the fate of the world's most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

In March 2014, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was first reported. By October 2014, it had become the largest and deadliest occurrence of the disease.Over 4,500 people have died. Almost 10,000 cases have been reported, across Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the United States.Impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone is the terrifying, true-life account of when this highly infectious virus spread from the rainforests of Africa to the suburbs of Washington, D.C in 1989. A secret SWAT team of soldiers and scientists were quickly tasked with halting the outbreak. And they did. But now, that very same virus is back. And we could be just one wrong move away from a pandemic.

La historia del brote de Ébola más mortífero en la historia: un relato apasionante de los médicos y científicos que lucharon, y luchan, por protegernos.Zona caliente: área del laboratorio denominada asi por los cientificos que investigan los virus mas letales como el ebola. Sellada hermeticamente, sus accesos estan rigurosamente controlados y los operarios visten trajes especiales sometidos a duchas de desinfeccion antes de abandonar el recinto. Parte de los hechos narrados en este libro transcurren en una zona caliente gestionada por el Ejercito de Estados Unidos en Maryland.Zona caliente fue escrito y publicado en 1994 para explicar los origenes y la evolucion del virus ebola y advertir del peligro de su propagacion en el futuro. Su autor, Richard Preston, catedratico de la Universidad de Princeton y un destacado especialista en abordar temas cientificos con un alto nivel de rigor y conocimiento de la materia -ha sido galardonado con el Premio del Instituto de Fisica de Estados Unidos yZona caliente es lectura recomendada en los institutos de Norteamerica-, fue el primero en dar a conocer al gran publico la amenaza del ebola, un virus potencialmente mil veces mas letal que el VIH del sida y que, hasta el dia de hoy, no ha sido controlado en su totalidad.La narracion de esta historia, que se lee como una novela, se basa en hechos reales documentados con precision y contrastados hasta el limite de lo posible. El resultado es un relato apasionante y esclarecedor, una fuente rica en datos fidedignos sobre todos los aspectos involucrados en este desafio de la naturaleza. Asi, los lectores podran formarse una opinion razonada por encima de todo el torrente de informaciones fragmentadas que propician en la opinion publica una sensacion de desconcierto y temor.