Join us for our annual community read- One Book, One Canyon! Award-winning, best-selling science writer David Quammen will be live, in-person at the library for a talk about his new book, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, on Thursday, March 16th at 5:30.

All of our promotional copies are spoken for,  but Between the Covers has plenty in stock and will be a the talk on Thursday selling books as well. We also have the physical book, audiobook, and ebook available for checkout. 

Big thanks to Friends of the Library for making this event possible with their financial support.  Become a member today! Thanks also to Telski for providing our special guest a lift ticket so he can really have the Telluride winter experience while he is here.

Breathless is a “gripping” (The Atlantic) but “clear-eyed analysis” (Time) of SARs-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a “forever virus,” destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that:

-Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming

-Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that “the next big one” would be caused by a changeable new virus—very possibly a coronavirus—but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons

-The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed

-And much more

Written by “one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades” (Chicago Tribune), This “compelling and terrifying” (The New York Times) account is an unparalleled look inside the frantic international race to understand and control SARS-CoV-2—and what it might mean for the next potential global health crisis.

David Quammen’s books include Breathless, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Premio Letterario Merck, in Rome. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among other magazines, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with two Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.