A very nice, and long, discussion of the zoonoses. The actual information here could be put in one chapter, but the author entertains us with accounts of his field trips, history, biographies of those he met, and assorted diversions. I disliked his occasional use of common terms for bodily fluids and excreta. Sometimes these are clearly meant to be funny, i.e. when feces are called that except in the last line of a paragraph, and overall I suppose they are meant to make the story more acceptable to a broader audience, but they are unnecessary and sometimes inaccurate; do ticks drool?. He also defines the word morbidity as the frequency of illness, which must be an epidemiological definition. That is fine, but the readers who enjoy the mention of piss, etc., might be misled since morbidity is a commonly used word with another definition. The attempt to describe the mathematics of infectious disease transmission is laudable, and he gives quite good summaries of viral taxonomy and interesting conversations with experts about the infectious disease significance of the RNA viruses.