Author David Quammen to Speak at Asheville School

David Quammen, author of Spillover, will speak in the Walker Arts Center’s Graham Theater on Thursday, October 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Asheville School. The event is free and open to the public with limited seating available.

Quammen has written 11 books and published hundreds of nonfiction pieces in Esquire, Outside, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. He has been honored with an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Here’s an excerpt from Quammen’s New York Times Op Ed piece, Anticipating the next Pandemic, on September 22, 2013:

“The next big and murderous human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease-new to humans, anyway.  The bug that's responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won't come from outer space.  Odds are that the killer pathogen-most likely a virus-will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal.

David Quammen's Spillover is a work of science reporting, history, and adventuresome travel, tracking this subject around the world.  For five years, Quammen shadowed scientists into the field--a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, a suburban woodland in Duchess County, New York--and through their high-biosecurity laboratories.  He interviewed survivors and gathered stories of the dead.  He found surprises in the latest research, alarm among public health officials, and deep concern in the eyes of researchers.  Spillover delivers the science, the history, the mystery, and the human anguish as page-turning drama.

From what innocent creature, in what remote landscape, will the Next Big One emerge?  A rodent in southern China?  A monkey in West Africa?  A bat in Malaysia that happens to roost above a pig farm, from which hogs are exported to Singapore?  In this age of speedy travel between dense human populations, an emerging disease can go global in hours.  But where and how will it start?  Recent outbreaks offer some guidance, and so Quammen traces the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee.

Spillover asks urgent questions.  Are these events independent misfortunes, or linked?  Are they merely happening to us, or are we somehow causing them?  What can be done?   But it's more than a work of reportage.  It's also the tale of a quest, through time and landscape, for a new understanding of how the world works.

Click here<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbI3MQ5ovMo> for a video about his book. Visit his website<http://www.davidquammen.com/> for more information.

Asheville School is a nationally acclaimed co-ed, college preparatory, boarding and day school, enrolling approximately 280 students from 20 states and 17 countries. Recent graduates have been accepted to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Caltech, UCLA, UNC-Chapel Hill, Davidson, NC State, University of Virginia, Emory, Duke, Wake Forest, and Yale among others.