The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

The introduction had me hooked, so I excitedly bought the book. The first couple of chapters are very heavily history based, as in way back to the beginning of recorded human history. Of course this book is gonna be history based, but I found myself a little bored reading ancient history. I stopped reading it, but I plan on picking it up again and forcing myself through the ancient history to get to the more modern history which I'm more interested in.

An excellent book detailing the history of the mosquito form the age of the dinosaur to the present day. The author takes you on a historical journey and you learn that the dinosaurs may have been weakened to the point of near extinction by the mosquito, and the asteroid impact may have been the coup de grace that sealed their fate. You will discover that the mosquito was essentially engaged in every major combat on the planet, from the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia to the 300 Spartans, the Indian Wars, the revolutionary war, the Civil War, the first world war and the second world war, the building of the Panama Canal. Youll read about the Malarial parasite and how deadly it is and how it transforms itself to survive. How mosquitoes spread viruses around the world. This is truly a fascinating book. I do believe that it is time to eradicate the mosquito species involved in the transmission of Malaria and other dangerous viruses. This has already been accomplished by a company that has created genetically modified mosquitos that mate with a female and her offspring either dies or produces only males. So it can be done, but the environmental impact needs to be studied some more. It's also interesting that mosquitos have served as a barrier for humans and other mammals to enter certain areas. An example would be the Amazon rain forest. As humans clear cut this area, Mosquitos will attack and what new diseases will force us to move away from these areas?A very good book and well worth the long read.

He is so focused upon the nefarious mosquito that he seems to miss that he begins repeating himself. He will give a tip of the hat in a chapter to some historical aspect and then in a following chapter go into further detail about the very same factoid. Mostly, he follows a chronological timeline (except when he backtracks). It is not the page-turner that I expected. I have not finished reading but the scary general sense is that I want to encase myself in a plastic bubble slathered with insect repellent. The shock to me is that pregnant women become special targets and victims of this blood sucker. It would be a movie horror film if the actual virus' carried were not so deadly and disabling.

Very interesting and informative read. Hard to believe that a nonfiction book would be this hard to put down.

I grew up in the Mississippi delta without air conditioning and mosquitoes were constant companions in the warm months of the year. I was one of those kids who would follow the mosquito fogger truck around the neighborhood and ride my bike in and out of the emitted insecticidal fog. When I came across this book I had to get it and read it. This book is not so much about the mosquito as it is about the mosquito as a vector for diseases like malaria and yellow fever that undermined military campaigns throughout history as naive forces came in to contact with diseases like malaria and yellow fever to which they had little or no immunity. I learned that sick soldiers are much more of a burden to armies than dead soldiers, malaria was used to treat syphilis (spirochetes cook in the fever), malaria inhibits the blood thinner in mosquito saliva so they have to bite more folks to get their full blood meal, there was no malaria in the New World (but there were mosquitoes) before it came over with the Europeans and Africans, and for now you're only safe in Antarctica. There are lots of other interesting little tidbits strewn throughout the book, but you have to wade through a lot of conflict to get them. That's OK, it was kind of a nice review of major conflicts throughout history.

The Mosquito, while beginning and ending on interesting notes, is too much of a simplified retelling of the history of Western civilization to be worth reading. The first chapter explains the mechanism and evolutionary history of mosquito borne viruses while the last chapter describes both the private and public efforts to eradicate such diseases.In between, there is a litany of descriptions of the great wars of the Western world with the repeated refrain that the winning side was aided by General Mosquito. We hear about the Peloponnesian war, the Punic conflicts, the Crusades, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the World Wars, the war in Vietnam...all of this seemingly oblivious to the fact that history does not proceed towards modern America as its apex. Even more, the fact that wars are only a part of human history is similarly ignored.If the author could have simply stuck to describing the effect of mosquitos in these conflicts it would have been a much shorter book. Instead, he retells all of this from a mile high perspective. It’s not so much that he gets things wrong as that it’s impossible to do justice to three thousand years of history in a book ostensibly devoted to another topic.What could have been a genuinely fascinating look into the effect of mosquitos on human history turns into a history of Western conflicts. Not recommended unless you are a devotee of military history.