The world mosquitoes built The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator Timothy C. Winegard Dutton, 2019. 496 pp.

Timothy Winegard's entertaining new book, The Mosquito, chronicles the impact of mosquito-borne disease, principally malaria, throughout history. The majority of the book is dedicated to the mosquito's impact on the rise and fall of empires. Alexander the Great, we learn, pulled back from his Indian campaign when his armies were decimated by malaria. (He himself may have later died from malaria.) And the Pontine Marshes, which protected Rome from the attentions of Hannibal at the end of the second Punic War, later contributed to major annual summer epidemics of malaria. During this period, Romans prayed to the fever goddess Febris for relief, and Rome was described as a death trap with a fever-puffing subterranean dragon.