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Zusatztext 81818653 Informationen zum Autor Monica Murphy is an internationally bestselling romance author whose novels have topped the New York Times and USA Today charts. She has sold over two million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen languages. She lives with her family in central California on fourteen acres in the middle of nowhere, along with their one dog and too many cats. Klappentext The most fatal virus known to science, rabies-a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans-kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes. "A searing narrative." -The New York Times "In this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system. . . . A smart, unsettling, and strangely stirring piece of work." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fascinating. . . . Wasik and Murphy chronicle more than two millennia of myths and discoveries about rabies and the animals that transmit it, including dogs, bats and raccoons." -The Wall Street Journal Introduction Ours is a domesticated age. As civilization has advanced over the march of millennia, humans have assiduously stripped the animal kingdom of its armies, decommissioned its officers. Some erstwhile adversaries we have hunted to extinction, or nearly so. Others we confine to zoos, to child-friendly safari parks. The balance we shunt to the margins as we clear their land for ourselves—erecting our own sprawling habitats on the ruins of theirs, naming our cul-de-sacs for whatever wilderness we dozed to pave them. Peer through news reports, though, and one can find pockets of resistance, as if some ancient animal essence were periodically reawakening. Consider the bobcat in Cottonwood, Arizona, that set out on a rampage one recent March evening, menacing a worker outside a Pizza Hut and then sauntering into a bar, sending patrons onto the pool table, mauling the one who dared to snap a picture on his phone. Or the furious otter in Vero Beach, Florida, at a waterfront golf community called Grand Harbor (a “gated enclave,” brags its website, “for those seeking the ultimate resort-at-home lifestyle”), that gnawed three residents, one of them while out on the links. Or the enraged beaver at the Loch Raven Reservoir, in the genteel exurban sprawl north of Baltimore, that cruelly interrupted the summertime reverie of four swimmers, a nightmare that ended only when the husband of one pulled the beaver from his wife’s upper thigh and smashed it with a rock. Typically these creatures will shun the society of humans. But in an instant we can find them transformed into bewilderingly avid attackers, accosting us as we retrieve our mail or walk our dogs, sometimes even carrying out a home invasion. A particularly harrowing tale comes to us from the Adirondack hamlet of Lake George, N.Y. On an April evening just a few years ago, a young couple was walking from their car when they were set upon by a gray fox. The two managed to rush inside their home and close the door. But nearly a half hour later, when they opened the door again, the fox lay in wait; it sprinted toward the opening; only quick reflexes allowed the young man to close it just as the creature’s snout broached the threshold. When an animal control officer arrived, the fox attacked his SUV, repeatedly sinki...
