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A sentence from SPILLOVER

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic


"The University of Kinshasa sits on a hilltop near the edge of the city, reachable by an hour's taxi ride through the broken streets, the smoggy sprawl, the snarled traffic of vans and busses and pushcarts, past the street-side vendors of funerary wreaths, the cell-phone-recharge kiosks, the fruit markets, the meat markets, the open-air hardware stores, the tire-repair stores and cement brokers, the piles of sand and gravel and garbage, the awesome decrepitude of a postcolonial metropolis shaped by eight decades of Belgian opportunism, three decades of dictatorial misrule and egregious theft, and then a decade of war, but filled with 10 million striving people, some of whom are dangerous thugs (as in all cities) and most of whom are amiable, hopeful, and friendly."

Say that in one breath!

Spillover is a recently published volume by David Quammen, a piece of popularized science quite analogous to Microbe Hunters, the classic history-of-medicine book.

Quammen in interested especially in research into both viruses and bacteria that cross species boundaries, and his theme is that with the increasing encroachment of human populations into jungles, and our increasing density as a species in many places and climates, we have made the occurrence of spillovers routine. Some of these spillovers lead to dramatic death tolls (like Ebola) and others to global pandemics (like AIDS).

He tries throughout to personalize his account. He presumably feared that the more technical/scientific parts, which involve the mathematical equations inherent in epidemiology, the details of laboratory protocol, the shifting scientific nomenclature for strains of viruses, etc., might be too dry. So he tells much of this as the story of his travels around the world to places like the University of Kinshasa.

Nonetheless, the above sentence strikes me as monstrous. A viral attack upon English prose! I don't remember anything like that sprawl of roughly 125 words [yes that's an estimate, no I won't count] between capitalization and period in any comparably themed and targeted work.

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