BOOKS IN BRIEF

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

THE MOSQUITO, far and away mankind’s deadliest enemy, has killed half of all the people who ever lived. In his fascinating book The Mosquito, Timothy C. Winegard, a historian at Colorado Mesa University, reexamines human history through the singular prism of this bloodsucking insect—or, more precisely, through the devastating diseases like malaria and yellow fever that it carries. He shows that mosquitoes have had an outsized impact on the course of nations, empires, and peoples.

Winegard finds no shortage of pivotal events to pin on the little critter. The mosquito ended Alexander the Great’s campaigns and saved Rome from Hannibal. (The same malarial swamps near Rome—the Pontine Marshes—that gave Hannibal trouble were later weaponized