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The Mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator. By Timothy C. Winegard. (Dutton: 2019. pp. 485. Paper, $18.00)

As stated by Raughley Nuzzi in his review of The Mosquito on goodreads, “This was an extremely disappointing book.” In his review he hits on all the main points I wanted to bring up on my own, with some additions. I thought I would go point by point and offer my own thoughts as supplemental material, . After the rave review blurbs on the inside cover, I was surprised to find this book severely lacking in analytical content and even something as simple as footnotes/endnotes. I was hard to consider the book a work of popular history, let alone actual scholarship. Here are my elaborations:

A “Western/American-centric approach.” Like Nuzzi, I was hoping for an examination of the mosquito’s role in world history. The title, after all, declares the book a “human history,” which includes areas outside the West. I can only imagine how fascinating it might have been to read about how Asia dealt with mosquito, if they faced the same diseases and came up with different or similar methods of combating mosquitos as those in the West did. Instead, this is a history of western civilization that offers no real value to the historical narrative. Winegard will narrate events (mostly wars, another of Nuzzi’s criticisms) and then tacks on at the end that this many people died from mosquito-borne diseases and therefore they caused the outcome of the war or events.

Correlation is not causation. This is my own criticism, and it tacks onto the point I made above. Winegard is very good at racking up body counts (the origins of these numbers are mysterious, as I will cover in my next bullet) but he doesn’t really do anything to prove mosquito-borne illness was a responsible for the course of the events. He will detail an event or environment, throw in a body count, and say that since so many people died of mosquito-borne illness, these diseases were the reasons for the outcomes. There is no data to back up that these correlations are causations. They could just be coincidences. Or perhaps they did play a role, but rarely is an historical event decided by just one factor. Here is an example of what Winegard has to say about the outcome of the Civil War:

“Given manpower considerations, malarious mosquitos helped drain southern military strength, promoted a northern victory, preserved the Union, and dismantled the institution of slavery.” (331)

Winegard is making the claim that mosquitos single-handedly decided the outcome of the Civil War and ended slavery. This is just one egregious example of Winegard pinning entire historical outcomes on the mosquito alone. Again, there is no real data provided to back up these claims, which leads to my next point.

Citing Sources. While Winegard does use asterisks to make asides, not once does he provide any footnotes or endnotes. There is a long bibliography at the end of the book, and there are “notes” at the end, but no indication as to which notes go with which claims. Winegard admits it can be difficult to pin down statistics in history, but his book goes beyond statistics to making the claims I detailed above. Without proper footnotes it is impossible to trace the path of his research and review sources that might support his argument. As a PhD in history, I am surprised he was able to get away with his. Yes, this a work of popular history, but if you are going to make an argument that one insect altered the course of world history many times, you need to lay your research bare.

Voice. As Nuzzi mentions, Winegard’s voice can be jarring. This is a work of popular history, so a more conversational tone might be expected, and I don’t have a problem with that. It is why I sometimes pick popular history over scholarly history. But Winegard does not pull it off. He is constantly making jokes that simply fall flat. I feel like an editor should have stepped in here and reined him in. When he is just narrating events he usually does just fine, but every time he makes a joke, usually about contemporary issues, it pulled me out of the book and left me irritated. The jokes are unnecessarily disruptive.

Race. Winegard makes the point again and again that Blacks had immunity to mosquito-borne diseases because they encountered them in Africa or had developed genetic resistance to mosquito-borne disease and therefore were protected. They had been seasoned. He believes that this is why enslavers wanted to employee Africans – their immunity made them a cheap, natural-borne fit for laboring in mosquito infested environments. And it is true that enslavers at the time believed that Africans had a greater resistance to mosquito-borne disease, and that was one reason they believed they made better workers. Unfortunately for Winegard, these myths have proven to be just that – myths. Africans died at the same rate as whites, and as to seasoning, every time slaves entered a new environment, they had to undergo the seasoning process again, just like whites did. I found it very off-putting that Winegard kept emphasizing this argument. Even if some slaves had a certain level of resistance, it certainly wasn’t dominate enough to provide a suitable bulwark against disease in a large population.

War. As mentioned by Nuzzi and other reviewers, Winegard’s west-centric narrative focuses on wars and military history, and from the author bio it looks like that may be what his background is in. His narrative follows the progression of wars in the West, where it may be easiest to trace statistics on mosquito-borne illness. But this focus loses out on what might be other facets of his book, such as a cultural history of the mosquito, or as Nuzzi relates, “a revelatory work on epidemiology and anthropology.” As I said earlier, this book reads as a narrative history of the West oriented around war that has the mosquito randomly interjected to prove that it has been our greatest killer, again, with no facts or sources to back that up.

Hyperbole. In his introduction Winegard states,

“The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted death approaching half of all humans that have ever lived. In plain numbers, the mosquito has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief 200,000-year existence.” (2)

Where do these numbers come from? He adds a note that the statistics can be hard to land on precisely and that there are many different factors that must be included from making estimates, but he cites no sources at all on where these humungous numbers came from. Most importantly, do they come from a reputable source(s)? Perhaps I missed the source for these numbers, but even so, it should not be that hard to find.

As you can see, I had many issues with this book. After 485 pages, I still didn’t feel like I’d learned anything new, except maybe of Winegard’s implicit disdain for Rachel Carson. I can’t recommend this book for scholarly or pleasure reading. It is simply too problematic.