Richard Preston. The Demon in the Freezer. 2002.

Rambling, sensationalistic, inconclusive, but genuinely disturbing nonfiction about the threat of biowarfare

If you’re a suicidal terrorist, why go to the trouble of hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building when you could buy a teaspoon of smallpox on the Asian black market and drop it in the New York subway system?

This book, thrown together in the wake of the 2001 anthrax scare, recycles a lot of material from his previous books, The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event. But it provides a great overview of smallpox, in case you didn’t have enough to worry about.

Trouble is, Richard Preston is doing too well off his best-sellers actually to seriously address the means of eliminating the threat of a bioterror attack. Thus this book is more sensationalistic than sincere.