Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have been researching quarantine
since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Until Proven Safe, they
bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent
reading for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute
investigation of the interplay of forces---biological, political,
technological--that shape our modern world.
Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means
waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is
also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of
guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe.
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, built to
contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and
from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where
pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a
novel coronavirus.
But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical
isolation. In Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste
isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken
with a disease that threatens the world's wheat supply, and meet NASA's
Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from
extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate
tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and
algorithmic prediction.
We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both
unprecedented and inevitable; Until Proven Safe helps us make sense of
our new reality through a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking
exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual
responsibility.
