Richard Preston has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 87 ratings. The most-rated is The Hot Zone.
The Hot Zone
Summary
A highly infectious, deadly virus from the Central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days, 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.
©2004 Richard Preston. All rights reserved (P)2007 Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
Micro
Summary
Three men are found dead in the locked second-floor office of a Honolulu building, with no sign of struggle except ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly unrecognizable to the human eye. In the lush forests of Oahu, an advance in micro-robotics has put unheard-of resources at the fingertips of science; trillions of previously unknown micro-organisms, tens of thousands of species of bacteria, are being discovered, feeding a search for new life-saving drugs and profitable applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited to work at a cutting-edge microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies’ exploratory work is conducted under a veil of secrecy and promises the young researchers the chance to wield unprecedented new tools at the limits of scientific discovery. To participate they must commit now and come to Hawaii—or be left behind and watch their peers reap the rewards. But when the true costs of Nanigen’s innovations are revealed in Oahu, the graduate students find themselves cast out of the stable certainties of the lab, thrust into a hostile wilderness, prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. An instant classic, Michael Crichton’s boundary-pushing and up-to-the-minute final thriller has all the hallmarks of his greatest adventures. And no one is better suited to complete this novel than visionary science writer Richard Preston: pitting nature against technology in vintage Crichton fashion, Micro melds scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction to create yet another masterpiece of sophisticated, cutting-edge entertainment.
©2011 John Michael Crichton Trust (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
The Demon in the Freezer
Summary
“The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines.” (Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy) The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a number-one New York Times best seller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the US biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense. Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at USAMRIID, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top-secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox - and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979, in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers - at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines. USAMRIID went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 and activated its emergency response teams when the first anthrax letters were opened in New York and Washington, D.C. Preston reports, in unprecedented detail, on the government's response to the attacks and takes us into the ongoing FBI investigation. His story is based on interviews with top-level FBI agents and with Dr. Steven Hatfill. Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing controversial experiments with live smallpox virus at CDC. Preston takes us into the lab where Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating precision, what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.
©2002 Richard Preston (P)2002 Books on Tape, Inc.
Crisis in the Red Zone
Summary
New York Times Best Seller An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic “Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells is all true makes it all more terrifying.” (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction) From the number-one best-selling author of The Hot Zone, now a National Geographic original miniseries.... This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly fell ill and died. The ensuing global drama activated health professionals in North America, Europe, and Africa in a desperate race against time to contain the viral wildfire. By the end - as the virus mutated into its deadliest form, and spread farther and faster than ever before - 30,000 people would be infected, and the dead would be spread across eight countries on three continents. In this taut and suspenseful medical drama, Richard Preston deeply chronicles the pandemic, in which we saw for the first time the specter of Ebola jumping continents, crossing the Atlantic, and infecting people in America. Rich in characters and conflict - physical, emotional, and ethical - Crisis in the Red Zone is an immersion in one of the great public health calamities of our time. Preston writes of doctors and nurses in the field putting their own lives on the line, of government bureaucrats and NGO administrators moving, often fitfully, to try to contain the outbreak, and of pharmaceutical companies racing to develop drugs to combat the virus. He also explores the charged ethical dilemma over who should and did receive the rare doses of an experimental treatment when they became available at the peak of the disaster. Crisis in the Red Zone makes clear that the outbreak of 2013-2014 is a harbinger of further, more severe outbreaks, and of emerging viruses heretofore unimagined - in any country, on any continent. In our ever more interconnected world, with roads and towns cut deep into the jungles of equatorial Africa, viruses both familiar and undiscovered are being unleashed into more densely populated areas than ever before. The more we discover about the virosphere, the more we realize its deadly potential. Crisis in the Red Zone is an exquisitely timely book, a stark warning of viral outbreaks to come.
©2019 Richard Preston (P)2019 Random House Audio
Panic in Level 4
Summary
Bizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives. From The Hot Zone to The Demon in the Freezer and beyond, Richard Preston's best selling works have mesmerized readers everywhere by showing them strange worlds of nature they never dreamed of. Panic in Level 4 is a grand tour through the eerie and unforgettable universe of Richard Preston, filled with incredible characters and mysteries that refuse to leave one's mind. Here are dramatic true stories from this acclaimed and award-winning author, including: The phenomenon of "self-cannibals", who suffer from a rare genetic condition caused by one wrong letter in their DNA that forces them to compulsively chew their own flesh - and why everyone may have a touch of this disease. The search for the unknown host of Ebola virus, an organism hidden somewhere in African rain forests, where the disease finds its way into the human species, causing outbreaks of unparalleled horror. The brilliant Russian brothers - "one mathematician divided between two bodies" - who built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail-order parts in an attempt to find hidden order in the number pi (Ï?).In fascinating, intimate, and exhilarating detail, Richard Preston portrays the frightening forces and constructive discoveries that are currently roiling and reordering our world, once again proving himself a master of the nonfiction narrative and, as noted in The Washington Post, "a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting page-turners".
©2008 Richard Preston (P)2008 Random House, Inc.