Until Proven Safe

November 24, 2020 Nicola Twilley Geoff Manaugh Pandemic

I was looking up author Nicola Twilley (who I had linked to here before), and just as I wondered why she hadn’t published any articles lately, I realized that she’s been working on an (incredibly timely) book: Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine.

Quarantine is such a simple, profound, and effective idea that it’s almost hard to realize that it is in fact an idea—a concept that needed to be discovered, figured out, refined, and, of course, applied. We are now all too aware of how it is applied, but we know far less about how the idea came to be—and where it may yet go.

Until Proven Safe tracks the idea of quarantine around the globe, through time and space, chasing the story from the lazarettos and quarantine islands of Venice—built before communicable diseases were really understood—to the hallways of the CDC, NASA, and the cutting-edge labs and conference rooms where the future technology of quarantine is being developed. The result is a tour of an idea that could not be more urgent or relevant, a book full of stories, people, and insights that is as compelling as it is definitive.

The book comes out in May 2021.

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