Richard Preston Books In Order

The Cobra Event

The Cobra Event is the story of a secret counter terror operation. It is set in motion one spring morning in New York City when a seventeen year old student wakes up feeling vaguely ill. She seems to be coming down with a cold. Hours later she is having violent seizures, blood is pouring out of her nose, and she has begun a hideous process of self cannibalization. Soon, other gruesome deaths of a similar nature have been discovered, and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta sends a forensic pathologist. an expert in epidemiology, to investigate. What she finds precipitates a federal crisis. The details of this story are fictional, but they are based on a scrupulously thorough inquiry into the history of biological weapons and their use by civilian and military terrorists. ‘The creation of advanced biological weapons using methods of genetic engineering and biotechnology is sometimes known as ‘black biology,” Richard Preston writes. The extent to which the products of black biology are available nearly everywhere in the world is shocking. Preston’s sources for his story include members of the FBI and the United States military, public health officials, intelligence officers in foreign governments, and scientists who have been involved in the development and testing of strategic bioweapons. The stories of what they have seen and what they expect to happen and how they plan to deal with it are chilling. The Cobra Event is not science fiction. It is a dramatic, heart stopping account of a very real threat, told with the skill and authority that made Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone an internationally acclaimed bestseller.

Micro (With: Michael Crichton)

Three men are found dead in the locked second floor office of a Honolulu building, with no sign of struggle except for the ultrafine, razor sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye. In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier. But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the inherent forces of nature itself. An instant classic, Micro pits nature against technology in vintage Crichton fashion. Completed by visionary science writer Richard Preston, this boundary pushing thriller melds scientific fact with pulse pounding fiction to create yet another masterpiece of sophisticated, cutting edge entertainment.

The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story

In 1969, William Foster, Sr., a thirty three year old army reserve soldier, is lost in action in Vietnam. He leaves behind his beloved wife, Sarah Ann; a six year old daughter, Lila; and a thirteen year old son, Will, Jr. They live in a trailer on the coast of Maine, and parked beside the trailer is their father’s beautiful but unreliable lobster boat, the Sarah Ann. The Sarah Ann’s graceful curves and beautiful wood are a painful daily reminder of Will Sr.’s plans and dreams dreams now lost with him. The December afternoons are lonely and dark for Lila and Will, who must come home alone from school while their mother works. They get scared when they find evidence that someone has been visiting the trailer, and when they come home to find a rugged, cantankerous, somewhat smelly old man watching TV, it takes them a while to realize he’s…
Santa Claus. What Santa does with the lobster boat and how he handles Will’s one and only Christmas dream to have his dad back is the story of The Boat of Dreams. It brings laughter, surprises, and tears and tells through an unforgettable story how love is the one power that can overcome all.

First Light

Seven years before Richard Preston wrote about horrifying viruses in The Hot Zone, he turned his attention to the cosmos. In First Light, he demonstrates his gift for creating an exciting and absorbing narrative around a complex scientific subject in this case the efforts by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California to peer to the farthest edges of space through the Hale Telescope, attempting to solve the riddle of the creation of the universe. Richard Preston’s name became a household word with The Hot Zone, which sold nearly 800,000 copies in hardcover, was on The New York Times’s bestseller list for 42 weeks, and was the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles. Preston has become a sought after commentator on popular science subjects. For this hardcover reprint of what has been called ‘the best popular account of astronomy in action,’ Kirkus Reviews he has revised the text and written a new introduction. From the Hardcover edition.

American Steel

A report on the resurrection of an American Dream provides a glimmer of hope on the seemingly barren economic horizon with the story of an Indiana steel company that is aiming to restore some of the 300,000 jobs lost in that industry over the past decade.

The Hot Zone

Imagine a killer with the infectiousness of the common cold and power of the Black Death. Imagine something so deadly that it wipes out 90 per cent of those it touches. Imagine an organism against which there is no defence. But you don’t need to imagine. Such a killer exists: it is a virus and its name is Ebola. ‘The Hot Zone‘ tells what happens when the unthinkable becomes reality: when a deadly virus, from the rain forests of Africa, crosses continents and infects a monkey house ten miles from the White House. Ebola is that reality. It has the power to decimate the world’s population. Try not to panic. It will be back. There is nothing you can do…

The Demon in the Freezer

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 1 New York Times bestseller, 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 U.S. 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.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Wild Trees

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Panic in Level 4

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 bestselling 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 . 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. From the Hardcover edition.