![Breathless by David Quammen](http://covers.libro.fm/9781529191615_1120.jpg)
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account![Phone showing make the switch message](http://cdn.libro.fm/assets/website-images/switch-2024.png)
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Nowโs a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up today![Libro.fm app with gift bow](http://cdn.libro.fm/assets/website-images/app-gift-2024-q3.png)
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingBreathless
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weโre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
From the author of the powerful, prescient Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
Breathless is the story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a 'forever virus,' destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly. As scientists labour to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.
Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming; that some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that 'the next big one' would be caused by a changeable new virus - very possibly a coronavirus - but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons; and that the precise origins of this virus may not be known for years but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed.
Breathless takes us inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 as if we were peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase.
ยฉ David Quammen 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
David Quammen's sixteen previous books include The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Premio Letterario Merck. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the Atlantic, National Geographic and Outside, among other publications, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award.
Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with two Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python.
Visit him at DavidQuammen.com