The Hot Zone.

Richard Preston Random House, $23

It's easy to sneer at this book. Packaged as a nonfiction knockoff of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda strain, with hokey graphics ("Processing... You are cleared to enter..." reads some fake computer type that precedes the first chapter), cheesy jacket blurbs from Robert Redford and Stephen King, and occasionally hyperbolic prose, The Hot Zone seems targeted like a cruise missile for the best-seller list. But even if Random House hadn't tarted up Preston's expanded version of his New Yorker piece about a deadly jungle virus run amok in suburban Washington, this book would have been a runaway hit. With a little careful editing, Preston could have produced a work of nonfiction on the order of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. As it is, he has merely written a tremendously gripping, superbly reported narrative just a notch or two below those classics.

The Hot Zone tells the story of the Ebola and Marburg viruses, two uniquely horrible diseases that had several deadly outbreaks in Africa over the past two decades. Both viruses cause the body to "crash and bleed," as Preston puts it, a disgusting and torturous way to the whose details I lack the stomach to elaborate here. Suffice it to say that in 1989 a strain of Ebola, the more terrifying of the two diseases, found its way into a Reston, Virginia, warehouse via a shipment of monkeys from the Philippines, causing a mild panic within the medical community.

Reston is a suburb of Washington, where a few readers of this magazine live, including me. Indeed, I lived here in 1989 but didn't have a clue about the Ebola Scare. Preston reports with some glee that The Washington post botched its front-page story on the matter by stating, incorrectly, that the monkeys had "been destroyed as a precaution" at a time when they most emphatically had not been destroyed, and when quite a few scientists were nervously trying to figure out how to destroy them without contracting the disease. (He could have added, but didn't that the Post had been scooped by the suburban Journal newspaper chain.) The Post did a creditable job on subsequent stories, but those ran mainly in the Metro section.

Well, now I know. The doctors, who were working at least as hard on news containment as they were on biocontainment, were considerably less sanguine about the Prospects of averting a deadly epidemic than they let on. This is a nightmare for those of us who tend to believe scientific experts when they tell us confidently that this or that environmental or health risk is really minimal. Preston also does a marvelous job showing how even the Army's daredevil virus hunters who unwittingly exposed themselves to Ebola failed to quarantine themselves to protect the population at large. These folks knew better than anyone else the potential danger they Posed, but somehow the need to pick up the kids from school, or to go out with some pals for a drink, or whatever, came first.

Ebola Reston, as the strain is now known, did end up jumping from the monkeys into the bodies of a few homo sapiens, but for reasons not totally understood it didn't make them sick; some tiny genetic difference between Ebola Reston and its deadly near-identical twin, Ebola Zaire, averted calamity. Had this not proven the case, Washington probably would have had a gruesome epidemic on its hands. The number of deaths might not have been impressive--viruses as deadly as Ebola kill too quickly to allow for wide transmission--but you can bet there would have been hysteria in the nation's capital.

Timothy Noah is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The wall Street Journal.