Preston’s style of journalism, he says, is the equivalent of climbing into a boiling pot to better understand soup.
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In this collection, Preston describes some of his close encounters with the subjects he has written about, telling, for example, how he donned a “spacesuit” to visit a high-security U.S. Army lab where researchers study Ebola virus (the subject of Preston’s celebrated thriller The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story).
He goes on to describe how he climbed the tallest tree east of the Mississippi River, right after it had been killed by an invasive species — a tiny bug from Japan.