PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewApollo’s Arrow, by Nicholas Christakis, is a useful contribution to this initial wave of Covid books, sensible and comprehensive, intelligent and well sourced, albeit a little programmatic and dull ... one naturally expects that network science might afford him special insight into Covid-19. This book delivers on that expectation moderately ... \'It is still too early to know,\' Christakis writes, how the Covid-19 virus might mutate. It is indeed early, and many more books will offer to help us understand the pandemic. But Apollo’s Arrow is a good start. Another volume, a useful addition to the same shelf, was published in 1859: On the Origin of Species.
Timothy C. Winegard
MixedThe New York Review of BooksA reader can forgive Winegard all the jaunty pop-culture allusions, the bad puns, the unnecessary footnotes, the overheated compound adjectives ...and the proclivity toward repeated clichés...because his voice is amiable and his subject is huge. His book is charmingly ambitious. More disappointing than the small infelicities is his choice to neglect, almost entirely, the scientific dimension of mosquitoes ... His book suggests, in fact, that he’s not much interested in mosquitoes. He’s not much interested in telling one kind from another. He’s not much interested in Plasmodium falciparum, the malarial parasite that travels in female Anopheles mosquitoes and has caused most of those millions, those billions, of human deaths ... [There] are intriguing and potentially consequential scientific mysteries, which Winegard doesn’t choose to tackle. His interests are military and political history, sketched with General Anopheles as bugbear. We’re supposed to grant an author his choice of subject, but from a book titled The Mosquito we might expect more illumination of mosquitoes ... Still, Winegard’s The Mosquito is a rich trove of information—encyclopedic, in fact, telling us many things that we don’t know and many others that we already do ... But after all its treetop-level surveying of ancient history and old military campaigns, it comes down to ground level and more fully to life around the point where Benito Mussolini decides to drain those Pontine Marshes ... His book is indeed quite a war story, with one heroic combatant and one villainous enemy, but Earth’s history writ from the mosquito side would look much different.
