<p><b>'Manaugh and Twilley shed illuminating light on a phenomenon that seems utterly of the present moment.' <i>Financial Times’ </i>Best Books of the Year</b><br><br><b>'Startlingly timely, authoritatively researched, and electrifyingly written.' Steve Silberman, author of <i>NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity</i></b><br><br>Quarantine has shaped our world, yet it remains both feared and misunderstood. It is our most powerful response to uncertainty, but it operates through an assumption of guilt: in quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. An unusually poetic metaphor for moral and mythic ills, quarantine means waiting to see if something hidden inside of us will be revealed. <br><br><i>Until Proven Safe</i> tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space – from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt the widespread quarantine imposed by Covid-19 before the next pandemic hits through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.<br><br>Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley drop deep into the Earth to tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, strip down to nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer tasked with saving the Earth from extraterrestrial infections. <br><br>The result is part travelogue, part intellectual history – a book as compelling as it is definitive, and one that could not be more urgent or timely.</p>