The Mosquito

Author: Timothy C. Winegard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524743437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 639

Book Description
**The instant New York Times bestseller.** *An international bestseller.* Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award Finalist for the RBC Taylor Award “Hugely impressive, a major work.”—NPR A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power. The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village. Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.

The Mosquito

Author: Elise Gravel
Publisher: Tundra Books
ISBN: 0735266476
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
Hilarious illustrated nonfiction about mosquitos perfect for beginning readers. Conversational text and silly illustrations will have you up all night reading about the most annoying bug on Earth! Fast mosquito facts: Distinctive trait: Leaving annoying itchy bites Diet: Your blood (and nectar and plant juice) Special talent: Making a terrible whining sound in your ear The Mosquito covers habitat (mosquitos live everywhere except Antarctica and Iceland!), species (over 3,500!), history (the oldest recorded mosquito was 79 million years ago!) and much more. Although silly and off-the-wall, The Mosquito contains factual information that will both amuse and teach at the same time.

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Author: Verna Aardema
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0803760892
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
"In this Caldecott Medal winner, Mosquito tells a story that causes a jungle disaster. "Elegance has become the Dillons' hallmark. . . . Matching the art is Aardema's uniquely onomatopoeic text . . . An impressive showpiece." -Booklist, starred review. Winner of Caldecott Medal in 1976 and the Brooklyn Art Books for Children Award in 1977.

Mosquito

Author: Andrew Spielman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571209804
Category : Diseases
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
'Consider the most common mosquito on Earth. This soft, little, dusty-brown insect is Culex Pipiens. You've seen her land on your arm. You have caught her just at the end of her feeding, her translucent belly swelling red with your very own blood. At such a moment, you can be forgiven for failing to notice what an elegant and hardy thing she is. But she is . . . ' No creature has touched directly the lives of more human beings than the mosquito. She has been a nuisance, a pollinator of plants and an angel of death all over the globe. And throughout history, much of our trouble with the mosquito has been caused by man himself. Professor Andrew Spielman has dedicated his life to understanding this insect. In Mosquito he tells the story of man's struggle to live with the mosquito, from the defeat of Sir Francis Drake's fleet, to the death of thousands of Frenchmen working on the Panama Canal and to the recent panic over the West Nile Virus in New York. And he shows us how we have accelerated the spread of disease, describing the catastrophic failures of mosquito control which have ensured that - even now - one person dies of malaria every twelve seconds.

Mosquitoes

Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504083784
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
This Nobel Prize–winning author’s satirical Southern novel is “full of the kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen” (Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune). If ever there was a William Faulkner novel that could be called a portrait of the artist as a young man, Mosquitoes is that book. Set on a yacht excursion on Lake Pontchartrain, Faulkner’s second novel introduces his readers to the artistic community of New Orleans, a vibrant band of aspiring artists, charismatic dilettantes and social butterflies. A satiric look at the world Faulkner himself inhabited in his early years as a writer, Mosquitoes is a high-spirted, engaging novel from the Nobel laureate–winning author known for his classic portrayals of the American South. “It approaches in the first half and reaches in the second half a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men.” —Lillian Hellman

The Mosquito Coast

Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241959195
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Book Description
Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020 The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness. 'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times 'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror' Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian 'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony Burgess American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consul's File, The Family Arsenal, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.

The Mosquito Bowl

Author: Buzz Bissinger
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062879944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 585

Book Description
Instant New York Times Bestseller · Winner of the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation “Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is an American classic. With The Mosquito Bowl, he is back with a true story even more colorful and profound. This book too is destined to become a classic. I devoured it.” — John Grisham An extraordinary, untold story of the Second World War in the vein of Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, from the author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war – the invasion of Okinawa—their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: Former All Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly twenty men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL. When the trash-talking between the 4th and 29th over who had the better football team reached a fever pitch, it was decided: The two regiments would play each other in a football game as close to the real thing as you could get in the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal. The bruising and bloody game that followed became known as “The Mosquito Bowl.” Within a matter of months, 15 of the 65 players in “The Mosquito Bowl” would be killed at Okinawa, by far the largest number of American athletes ever to die in a single battle. The Mosquito Bowl is the story of these brave and beautiful young men, those who survived and those who did not. It is the story of the families and the landscape that shaped them. It is a story of a far more innocent time in both college athletics and the life of the country, and of the loss of that innocence. Writing with the style and rigor that won him a Pulitzer Prize and have made several of his books modern classics, Buzz Bissinger takes us from the playing fields of America’s campuses where boys played at being Marines, to the final time they were allowed to still be boys on that field of dirt and coral, to the darkest and deadliest days that followed at Okinawa.

Mosquitoes of the World

Author: Richard C. Wilkerson
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421438143
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1332

Book Description
The most complete reference work on mosquitoes ever produced, Mosquitoes of the World is an unmatched resource for entomologists, public health professionals, epidemiologists, and reference libraries.

Buzz, Sting, Bite

Author: Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1982112875
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
An enthusiastic, witty, and informative introduction to the world of insects and why we—and the planet we inhabit—could not survive without them. Insects comprise roughly half of the animal kingdom. They live everywhere—deep inside caves, 18,000 feet high in the Himalayas, inside computers, in Yellowstone’s hot springs, and in the ears and nostrils of much larger creatures. There are insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet. Most of us think life would be better without bugs. In fact, life would be impossible without them. Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not pollinate. No cocoa, no chocolate. The ink that was used to write the Declaration of Independence was derived from galls on oak trees, which are induced by a small wasp. The fruit fly was essential to medical and biological research experiments that resulted in six Nobel prizes. Blowfly larva can clean difficult wounds; flour beetle larva can digest plastic; several species of insects have been essential to the development of antibiotics. Insects turn dead plants and animals into soil. They pollinate flowers, including crops that we depend on. They provide food for other animals, such as birds and bats. They control organisms that are harmful to humans. Life as we know it depends on these small creatures. With ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson as our capable, entertaining guide into the insect world, we’ll learn that there is more variety among insects than we can even imagine and the more you learn about insects, the more fascinating they become. Buzz, Sting, Bite is an essential introduction to the little creatures that make the world go round.

Mosquito Empires

Author: J. R. McNeill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139484508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Book Description
This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.