Until Proven Safe
The gripping history of quarantine, from the Black Death to the post-Covid future
-
- 5,99 €
-
- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
'Manaugh and Twilley shed illuminating light on a phenomenon that seems utterly of the present moment.' Financial Times’ Best Books of the Year
'Startlingly timely, authoritatively researched, and electrifyingly written.' Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
Quarantine has shaped our world, yet it remains both feared and misunderstood. It is our most powerful response to uncertainty, but it operates through an assumption of guilt: in quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. An unusually poetic metaphor for moral and mythic ills, quarantine means waiting to see if something hidden inside of us will be revealed.
Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space – from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt the widespread quarantine imposed by Covid-19 before the next pandemic hits through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.
Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley drop deep into the Earth to tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, strip down to nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer tasked with saving the Earth from extraterrestrial infections.
The result is part travelogue, part intellectual history – a book as compelling as it is definitive, and one that could not be more urgent or timely.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
BLDGBLOG blogger Manaugh (A Burglar's Guide to the City) and Gastropod host Twilley take a riveting and timely look at how humanity has protected itself by isolating segments of its populations. Quarantines, they write, have "always been a stimulus for creatively rethinking the built environment," and while the authors cover the response to Covid-19, they also survey the ways animals avoid infecting others, agricultural safeguards against diseases that could decimate food supplies, precautions taken by NASA to not contaminate other planets, and how radioactive nuclear waste can be safely stored for tens of thousands of years. Manaugh and Twilley cull their research into a concise and logical series of recommendations for future public health crises, grounded in a deep appreciation of the human impact of quarantining. Though technological advances in tracking, testing, and containment offer promise for more effective quarantining, the future will likely see more quarantines, and thus will require "a politics and culture of collaboration." The way forward, they write, will require design creativity, legal reforms that ensure "that the authorities making... promises will deliver on them," and imaginatively thinking about quarantine as an experience that allows agency. This thoughtful study couldn't arrive at a better moment.