MixedThe New Yorker...[a] sprawling new book ...It turns out that, if you’re looking for them, the words \'mosquitoes,\' \'fever,\' \'ague,\' and \'death\' are repeated to the point of nausea throughout human history ... There’s a long tradition of history books that profess to explain the world through singular factors: salt or cod or the color blue. The Mosquito suffers from the necessary myopia of the genre (in addition to some florid writing, repetition, and digressions through blockbuster movies and the Western Civ highlight reel) ...[Wineguard\'s] argument that mosquitoes are responsible for the Magna Carta and, therefore, modern democracy is a cascade of contingencies ... Winegard doesn’t need these double-jointed reaches to persuade us of the hidden influence mosquitoes have had in shaping history and creating the world that we know today.
