Guests
by Charles Mann, August 12, 2011 11:28 AM
Once a week, my town, like all small towns in western Massachusetts, has a farmers market. People bustle around with their NPR shopping bags, tripping over dogs on too-long leashes and fingering the expensive produce. My family and I head there after breakfast, like almost everybody else we know. We buy our kids homemade popsicles from a farm run by an overall-wearing architect and smoothies made by a local yogurt-maker who has a solar-powered blender. There's a cheerful guy with a mountain-man beard who gathers mushrooms with his son and prefers bartering to actual cash. I quite like going to the market, but whenever I describe it to outsiders I find myself being a touch snarky, as I was here. The people are pleasant, the produce is good — what am I sneering at? Part of the reason is that this marvelous scene has a small irritant. It's all over the market, in bright yellow, red and green:
The idea is clear: What is small and local is good, ecologically, aesthetically, and even morally. More than that, buying local means preserving the traditions of our area, and preventing it from becoming an anonymous node in the global network. Western Massachusetts has long had small farms, so that means doing what you can to keep them going, notably buying their produce. Local = home.
For years my family has gone to a nearby hillside farm that has been worked continuously since the 1790s. At some point, the owners established a peach orchard, and every year the old man who ran it would tell us dubiously that we could see whether there was any fruit to pick, and every year the trees would be groaning beneath their load of peaches, and every year the old man would do this stylized double-take as we brought down baskets of fruit. The old man died, and now the farm is run by these nice lesbians who don't do stylized double-takes but do make silly Photoshopped images of local children carrying six-foot-wide strawberries on their heads. Multiply these stories by a dozen and you see why people like the farms.
At the same time, though... local. There's a problem there.
Fractured Cerebration
The tables at the market are covered with tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, bell peppers, kale, chard, basil, and a dozen types of greens. In the fall they are joined by apples, pears, peaches, and fall raspberries. Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of here. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown outside town; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway — there was a local species that is now gone). The "local" we are trying to protect is in fact the product of global exchange. Far from being an old-timey thrill, my farmers market is an exotic modern object.
The goal here is not to put the market down, still less the people who shop there. I share their delusions.
I, too, think of my garden and its produce as a kind of home. Futzing around with the plants is my refuge from email, deadlines, and my office desk. Animated by the bumper-stickers, I complained in one of the local nurseries that there was nothing in the entire space that was from anywhere within hundreds of miles. Embarrassing in retrospect, I issued this gripe as I was at the nursery cash register, paying for seedlings of bell pepper (origin: Mesoamerica), eggplant (origin: South Asia), and carrot (origin: Europe).
On the one hand, people want the wash of goods and services that the worldwide market provides. No one forced me to buy the tomato or pepper seeds I plant in my garden — or, for that matter, seeds for bok choy or Japanese eggplants or shiso, an Asian herb that we like. On the other hand, I resist the implications. I want to have what everyone everywhere has, but still be aggressively myself. Simultaneously denouncing and promoting globalization, I, too, am an example of fractured cerebration.
Here in this blog, I am not proposing any solution (plug: I take a stab at edging toward one in my book). But I should note that many Powell's online customers, too, share my delusions. In my town, lots of people buy their books at Powells.com. They're folks who like local, independent bookstores, of which Powell's is an exemplar and avatar. But what exactly are they thinking, reaching 3,000 miles with the globe-spanning Internet to shop locally? They — we, I should say, because I'm one of them — are examples of fractured cerebration.
A Really Good Book
These blog posts are supposed to sound like chatty messages from a friend while actually being a marketing device for a commercial product (my book). Creepy, right? To cancel the whiff of bad faith, at least a little, I thought I would talk about other writers' books — stuff that I could tout with a clear conscience, because I get no benefit from it.
One of the great thrills of my professional life was getting a warm letter from John Hemming. An amazingly admirable guy, Hemming has contacted native Amazonian groups that had never encountered Europeans; co-founded Survival International, one of the most important indigenous-rights organizations; directed the Royal Geographic Society for a quarter of a century; and run some of the biggest scientific studies of the Amazon. All the while, he wrote books — really good books, each and every one.
For my last book, 1491, I pilfered heavily from his gripping, grim The Conquest of the Incas. (I provide the link with a heavy heart; unconscionably, Hemming's U.S. publisher, Harcourt Brace, has yet released the revised, updated edition of the book available in England. I hear that this will change, though.) My new book depended in equal measure on his Tree of Rivers, an account, superbly readable, of the Amazon's tragic collision with Europe. Equally at home with natural science, geography, and history, a big book with big themes, I can't say enough good things about it.
Here is one passage that I underlined: In the mid-nineteenth century the United States became more ambitious [about exploiting the Amazon]. Its heading hydrographer and oceanographer, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, in 1853 published a study of Brazil's Amazonian and Atlantic waters. He noted that w
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Guests
by Charles Mann, August 11, 2011 11:58 AM
Air TransportTo visit most ranches in eastern Bolivia, you will need to hire a private plane. Pilots congregate at the outskirts of commercial airports, each in his (they are all men) own small hangar. When pilots assemble a full planeload of people (4-6 people, depending on the plane) with a single destination, they take off for that destination. As insurance, they keep several potential planeloads going, each hoping to travel to a different place, huddled in separate, mutually suspicious corners of the hangar and watching would-be passengers drift in. The group that reaches capacity first is selected.
Passengers must recognize this situation and scurry from hangar to hangar, looking for others who are going their way. On no account believe the people who drive in pickups around the hangars, bellowing that they have cheaper rides. Do not get into their trucks. They will take you several miles away, where you will be effectively confined to one hangar, hoping that your group fills up.
Most planes and their destinations do not have lights. You therefore must fly in daylight. If you do not have a ride by mid-afternoon, begin to worry. Recognizing your situation, pilots will offer to fly smaller-than-capacity groups — even solo passengers — at inflated rates. You must recognize that they, too, are worried. If they don't fly somebody somewhere, they don't eat.
In the plane, check to make sure that the seat is attached to the floor. Inspect the gas gauge before takeoff. Under no circumstances sit next to the woman carrying a huge sack of grapefruit. Make sure that your pilot is not doubling up on your flight by giving some of your passengers flying lessons. If you do end up on a flight-school run, insist that the pilot, not the student, land the plane.
Travel insurance would be a good idea, if it were possible to obtain.
Ground Transport
When driving in southern Niger, do not bother looking for gas stations. Few exist, and those few, thanks to an agreement the Niger government was more or less forced to sign with France, the former colonial power, sell French gasoline at extortionate rates. The gasoline is shipped from neighboring Libya and Nigeria to France, then reshipped to Niger.
Drivers should look instead for roadside clusters of teenage boys, often with protective cloth around their heads, standing by tables full of pop bottles. Plastic racks of 24 bottles on their heads, the boys walk across the Nigerian border, fill up the bottles with cheap Nigerian gas, and stopper them with rags. They sell the gas, bottle by bottle, to drivers — fill-up by Molotov cocktail.
Prices are somewhat fluid. It is useful to know the price of gas in neighboring nations. If you have a driver, it is useful to ensure that he is of a different ethnicity than the gas-sellers before dickering commences. Bargain, but try not to annoy the vendors. If soldiers with guns show up in the middle of the transaction, it can be useful to have the gas boys on your side in the subsequent discussions about the soldiers' "fees."
When filling up, it is important for the driver or the teenager to have a fine filter for the gas. You will be regarded as a Western fussbudget if you ask the boy pouring your gas to put out his cigarette. It is perfectly acceptable to complain about the small children playing hide-and-go-seek around the tables, though. Fear of spillage is acceptable.
Hotels
When you arrive in Manila, select your hotel carefully. Some island resorts cater to "mackers," middle-aged men, many of them Australian, who visit Asian countries to acquire by cash payment the temporary services of young women. Some Manila hotels cater to these people. Manila hotels with shuttle services to macker resorts are musts to avoid.
If you end up staying in such a hotel, do not answer the room phone, especially if the call comes after midnight. Do not answer the knock on your door. Do not speak to the young woman who is knocking, or the shadowy entrepreneurial figure standing to the side. (These rules do not apply to mackers, of course.)
The Philippines is an Asian country. If you enter a bar in which the male clientele is more than three-quarters non-Asian, inspect your surroundings. Is the average age gap between male and female customers more than 20 years? Are there no visible signs of marital connection between any of the opposite-sex couples at the tables? Consider going to another bar.
A Really Good Book
These blog posts are supposed to sound like genial messages from a friend while actually being advertisements for a commercial product (my book). Creepy, right? Hoping to cancel the whiff of bad faith, at least a little, I thought I would talk about other writers' books — stuff that I could tout with a clear conscience, because I get no benefit from it.
While writing this book, I had huge help from a friend, Susanna Hecht, a UCLA geographer who knows more than practically anybody about Amazonia. She let me read her forthcoming book, The Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides Da Cunha, the amazing tale of Brazil's greatest writer (da Cunha); his unfinished masterpiece on the Amazon (Lost Paradise); his calamitous marriage, which ended, along with his life, in a pistol duel; his previously hidden role in the great international scramble to seize the Amazon in the 19th century; his epic journey into the furthest reaches of the great river; and much else besides.
One thing I particularly liked is Susanna's treatment of Lost Paradise, which da Cunha left unfinished at his death. In the last few years we've seen all too many efforts by publishers to "complete" unfinished books. Every one that I have encountered has felt fraudulent — a carpenter's-gothic fake, patched together in ways unimagined by the author, with transitions sketched in by unknown editorial hands.
Susanna doesn't do that. Instead we get the fragments as da Cunha wrote them, woven through with his diaries, letters and the accounts of friends. We don't see the final product, which doesn't exist; instead we get to eavesdrop on the process of creation, on the author wrestling with his ideas. Because da Cunha was a fascinating polymath — an engineer-geographer-philosopher-journalist-diplomat in the midst of extraordinary personal and intellectual turmoil — following his thoughts is an amazing
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Guests
by Charles Mann, August 10, 2011 12:30 PM
Mexico City sits in a basin ringed by mountains. Snowfall and rainwater pour down the slopes; the mountains prevent it from escaping; the basin becomes a marsh. Centuries ago, the area's first inhabitants dredged the muck, turning five small bodies of water into a single 80-mile lake shaped like a backwards S. On the southern curve of the S was a group of low, swampy islands. With considerable ingenuity, the Triple Alliance (Aztec empire) turned these islands into a city of canals — much like Venice, except that the city of Tenochtitlan was twice as big as Venice. In its watery setting, Tenochtitlan dazzled the Spaniards who first saw it. Great causeways led across the lake to a city bigger than any in Spain, crowded with grand markets and opulent temples. An army of cleaners swept the streets — something the Spaniards had never seen. Another army of engineers vigilantly maintained the baffles, dams, and channels that kept spring floods from returning the city to its original state as a marsh. These latter efforts were invisible to Hernán Cortés and his troops. When they conquered Tenochtitlan in 1521, they unknowingly destroyed its water-control systems and killed off the engineers who ran them.
Click to view larger image. As a group, Cortés and his successors had little experience with complex hydrodynamic systems. The Spaniards tried to rebuild the native water system when they transformed Indian Tenochtitlan into Spanish Mexico City, but didn't know enough to do the job correctly. The city decayed slowly, then faster. Not until 1555 did the first bad flood occur. Then, they happened more quickly: 1580, 1604, 1607. Each was worse than its predecessor.
Desagüe
Like every writer, I remove many passages from my work that I wish could remain — not so much for the elegance of the phrasing as the interest of the subject. Enthralling but irrelevant, I grumpily tell myself. Out it goes.
Sometimes I look for a place to wedge it back in. I copy the cut paragraphs, and then scroll through the manuscript, hunting for a spot to hit "paste." I try half a dozen locations, hoping to talk myself into believing that I've found a place for this thought, this idea.
For 1493, I spent weeks reading about Mexico City's drainage system. I collected a small library of maps and books. I managed to get to some of its most important outlets. But I never managed to fit the material into the book. Still, I remained fascinated.
The reason was that in 1607, the imperial viceroy, Luis de Velasco, proposed a technical fix to the water problem: the desagüe (plughole or outlet). The desagüe was an eight-mile-long channel that would drain water from Mexico City north into the Tula River, which would carry it into the Gulf of Mexico. The first four miles were to be a canal — easy to build, if costly. The second four miles would tunnel through the surrounding mountains, a different story. At its deepest point the desagüe would tunnel 149 feet below ground. No Spaniard had ever built anything like it. No European had — it was the biggest construction project by Europeans since the Roman Empire.
The tunnel, constructed at huge cost, cut mainly through soft soil and loose stone. The chief engineer, like most Europeans at the time, was a follower of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that the world was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The four elements were in a hierarchy, higher members ruling lower. Because water was higher than earth, the engineers believed, the soft soil walls could not collapse and block its passage. Unsurprisingly, canal and tunnel repeatedly caved in and had to be rebuilt.
Few people like to spend time thinking about infrastructure, let alone pay taxes for it. After a taxpayers' revolt in 1623, desagüe maintenance stopped. Six years later Mexico City woke up to find as much as six feet of water on the streets. The lake washed over the causeways, blocking food shipments from the mainland. Foundations undermined, mansions and monasteries collapsed by the score. According to the archbishop, only 400 Spanish families stayed in the city, clustered on upper floors, futilely trying to pump away the rising lake. The figure, though surely too small, gives some idea how lonely the remaining inhabitants felt as they paddled their canoes through the ruined streets. Mexico City remained underwater almost continuously until 1634. Still nobody wanted to pay for a proper tunnel.
Mexico City (lower right) in 1774; north on left side of map It was a paradox. The desagüe functioned in the summer, draining the city. Slowly the lakes got smaller; Mexico City was no longer an island; the canals that had long been one of its greatest features shriveled and disappeared. But the desagüe didn't work well enough to prevent spring floods. The city was inundated in 1645, 1674, 1691, 1707, 1714, 1724, 1747 and 1763. Flooding continued until 1900 when at last the dictator Porfirio Díaz built a proper drainage tunnel. Only then did the citizenry discover that the desagüe had efficiently removed the city's water supply.
European Engineering
The first time I visited Mexico City, in the 1980s, it seemed endlessly hot and dusty. There was a water crisis and people were not allowed to wash their cars or sprinkle their yards. Looking at the arid land in the outskirts, I thought it must have always been that way. I asked my host, "Why would anybody build a city here?"
"This was a paradise on earth," he told me. "It took four centuries of Europeans' finest engineers to construct what we have now."
A Really Good Book
These blog posts are supposed to sound like genial messages from a friend while actually being advertisements for a commercial product (my book). Creepy, right? Hoping to cancel the whiff of bad faith, at least a little, I thought I would talk about other writers' books — stuff that I could tout with a clear conscience, because I get no benefit from it.
Many good books have been written about Jamestown — almost as many as about the Pilgrims. I was thoroughly impressed by Edward S. Morgan's American Slavery
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Guests
by Charles Mann, August 9, 2011 1:00 PM
The Chinese city of Yulin is on the edge of the Maowusu desert, which occupies the southernmost part of Inner Mongolia. Just north of the city was Mongol territory, and so heavily eroded remnants of the Great Wall cut through the suburbs ? or, rather, cut through what would be the suburbs if Yulin were a town in the U.S., but in China is an armada of coal-powered factories. Zhenbeitai, one of the Great Wall's three most important forts, is in Yulin. I was in Yulin to research my book, 1493, but naturally I wanted to see this part of the Great Wall. Josh D'Aluisio-Guerrieri, my friend and translator, China-hand supreme, was willing to go along. In China, foreigners can't rent cars, so Josh had arranged for a taxi. The idea was that we would stop at the Wall when we finished work for the day. Driving northwest from Yulin, the highway was boxed in by endless lines of replanted trees ? part of China's huge effort to reforest this area. We couldn't see actual desert until we left the main route and drove on little country roads. We had no particular destination in mind. We just took roads into villages until the asphalt petered out then walked around and talked to people. Do this enough, and you start to get a hint of what a place is like. What it was like: a desert. Here and there were low thorn bushes. Trees scraggly in yards and along the roads. Otherwise the land was almost pure sand ? we could have mined for sandboxes. Incredibly, the villagers were harvesting corn (maize, if you're outside the U.S.). It was as if they were farming a beach. China has a fifth of the world's people but less than a 10th of its fresh water. Most of that water is in two big rivers, the Yangzi and the Huang He (Yellow). How unfortunate that the nation's main crop is rice, grown in irrigated paddies! For farmers, China's vast, dry uplands were almost completely useless. Even though the Huang He was coursing through the canyons just 60 miles east, this land had never felt the plow or axe. Columbus changed all that. Portugal brought American maize to its colony in Macao in the 16th century. Spaniards brought American sweet potatoes to Spain's outpost in Manila. Both will grow just about anywhere. China surged out of river valleys and into the uplands. As the University of Chicago historian Ho Ping-ti (He Bing-di, in China) has noted, sweet potato, not rice, was "the poor man's staple" in northern China by 1800. Corn played the same role in the west and southwest. For a long time the results were spectacularly good, Ho said. Chinese farmers' yields soared; China's population boomed. But as time went by, Ho argued, it became apparent that farmers who had never planted crops in this kind of soil before were making beginners' mistakes. They planted in areas so steep and so dry as to be wildly unsuitable even for corn and sweet potatoes. The resultant erosion caused massive floods ? floods that make our own problems on the Mississippi look small and uncommon. The loss of life, public anger, vast expense, and destabilized food supplies caused by the floods helped topple the Ming dynasty. Destroy Forests, Open Wastelands! I was fascinated by this story, but wondered if it was actually true. Could things have been as bad as that? I didn't want to put these ideas in my book if they didn't pass the silly-grin test. Part of the reason I went to Yulin was to find out whether it was possible to make such a mess. Incredibly, Mao had repeated the same mistakes. Proclaiming revolutionary war-on-nature slogans ? "Move Hills, Fill Gullies and Create Plains!" "Destroy Forests, Open Wastelands!" ? villagers fanned out across the hills in the 1960s and 1970s, cutting down vegetation, terracing slopes, and planting on every flat surface. Still more massive erosion was the result, along with the usual flooding, dislocation, and massive public expenditure. Massive dust clouds blew east as far as Beijing. Remember those replanted trees? That was the government trying to undo its own past actions. Meanwhile, farmers kept planting ? what else could they do? In the afternoon, we stopped at the Great Wall. In that area, at least, the Wall had little towers every quarter of a mile or so, so that soldiers could communicate by waving flags. The towers were close enough so that visibility was good. A combination of coal smoke and airborne sand had changed things. When we arrived, we could barely see from one tower to another. The picture below was taken an hour before sunset on a day without a cloud in the sky. Trucks thundered by on the highway as we clambered along the eroded wall. Dust was all over my clothes and in my nose. I was beginning to believe that it really might be possible to make such a mess. A Really Good Book These blog posts are supposed to sound like chatty updates from this interesting fellow you'd want maybe to know while actually being advertisements for a commercial product (my book). Creepy, right? To neutralize the whiff of bad faith, at least a little, I thought I could talk about other writers' books ? books that I could tout with a clear conscience, because I get no benefit from it. At the end of each post in my little stint I'm extolling a book that was both helpful to 1493 (thanks!) and might be fun to read for somebody who is not researching the subject. Because part of 1493 is about how the Spanish empire was a Real Big Deal, I read a lot of histories of said empire. The most enjoyable, at least to me, was Henry Kamen's smart, concise, sophisticated Empire. One of many passages I underlined, chilling to read nowadays, is about how the Spanish government increasingly outsourced its functions to the private sector and ended up ceding operational control to foreign entities: Like any great enterprise, [the Spanish empire] was highly expensive to run. In times of peace, basic operations such as communications, trade and transport of supplies between the territories of the monarchy required a degree of efficiency that the central government could never guarantee, since it had no personnel who could carry out the task. Virtually all the important operations were therefore contracted out. Even the collection of the crown's own taxes was contracted, since there were no internal revenue officials. As in any large business, it was the ability to arrange transactions and move money that ensured success. To achieve this, the crown resorted to international bankers....All [of the empire's] nerve centers slipped firmly into the hands of outside businessmen who did not intend to let pass the opportunity to control the source of their profits. Without exception, Castilian traders and financiers were relegated to a secondary
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Guests
by Charles Mann, August 8, 2011 10:56 AM
I am thrilled to be writing for Powell's, not only because I grew up in the Northwest and have many happy memories of visiting the store, but because the book that I just wrote owes its start to Powell's. Sometime in the late 1980s I was browsing at the store and came across a used paperback on a bottom shelf: Ecological Imperialism by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. I'd heard of both ecology and imperialism before, of course, but had never seen them put together. My curiosity was snagged. I bent down and picked up the book.
Rarely can I recall, years later, the exact circumstances in which I first read a book. It only happens when a book grabs me hard, forcing me to exist in its world. Suddenly I'll look up, blinking, and realize with a little shock that I'm actually on the beach, or at a coffee shop, or (once) lying in the back of an old station wagon. That was the way it was Ecological Imperialism. Suddenly it was hours later, my back was aching from sitting in what I remember as a ratty kitchen-type chair in the aisle, and I'd totally blown the afternoon.
Crosby writes well, with a welcome dry wit. But what pulled me in was his picture of history. In Ecological Imperialism, the monarchs, armies, and inventors who had dominated the stage in my textbooks were suddenly joined by an unruly, surging, brightly colored menagerie of other beasts: bacteria and viruses, grasses and mosquitoes, wheat and bananas, honeybees and dandelions, horses and cattle. They were like the swirl of characters in a great Victorian novel, their paths crossing unexpectedly, disappearing in one place only to end up in another, affecting the protagonists' fates in ways impossible to predict.
Before Columbus, these creatures had been confined to their native continents. After 1492 they were carried over the oceans, often inadvertently — and released. Huge numbers of species from over there came over here, and huge numbers of species from over here went over there. It was the biggest event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.
Crosby called this ecological convulsion the "Columbian Exchange" in a previous book of that name and argued that it lay under and helped explain much subsequent history. The environmental changes induced by the exchange, he argued, benefited Europeans disproportionately, in ways they rarely understood at the time. Ultimately the rise of the West owed more to biology than it did to technology or economics.
Crosby's exact proposals have been argued about fiercely. But the idea of the Columbian Exchange is now part of the intellectual furniture of most historians, ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and geographers.
Years later, I got to know Crosby slightly. Almost every time we spoke, I suggested that he should update his books to take into account the enormous amount of research they had stimulated. Crosby was never interested; a restless, creative guy, he was on to other, newer things. One day when I had mentioned this notion a few too many times, he growled, "Well, if you think it's such a good idea, why don't you do it?" Naturally, I took his offhand quip as license. 1493, published this week, is the result. Thanks, Al. And thanks, Powell's.
A Really Good Book
Although I was, as I say, thrilled to be writing for Powell's, I also felt uncomfortable. These blog posts are supposed to sound like chatty updates from this interesting fellow you'd want maybe to know while actually being advertisements for a commercial product (my book). So I thought that one way I could neutralize the whiff of bad faith, at least a little, was to talk about other books — books that I could tout with a clear conscience, because they're not by me, and I get no benefit from it. At the end of each post in my little stint, down at the bottom here, I'll describe a book that was both helpful to 1493 (thanks!) and that might be fun to read for somebody who is not researching the subject.
After Al Crosby's works, Mosquito Empires is the first book that jumps to mind. Writing my previous book, I had corresponded with the author, John McNeill ("JR," like the Gaddis novel, is his byline). When I visited Jamestown, Va., on a research trip, I asked McNeill if I could buy him a cup of coffee (he teaches not too far away, in Washington, D.C.). He was kind enough to give me a then-unpublished book chapter, "Revolutionary Mosquitoes," about the insect's contribution to revolutions in Haiti, South America, and the United States.
I had vaguely planned to have a chapter about malaria, yellow fever, and mosquitoes that carry them, but McNeill's stuff was so much better than anything I had that I immediately decided to loot it (I am a journalist, after all). I have some pride, so I did a lot of research and came up with some material that I thought was interesting — and wasn't in McNeill's piece. Then, just as I was finishing my chapter, I discovered that McNeill, curse him, had expanded his article into a book. Worse, the book was really good — insightful, convincing, scientifically literate (not always a given for historians), and crisply written (not always a given for historians). I, of course, went through a second round of looting, but there was way too much good stuff for me in Mosquito Empires to do more than pilfer the odd fact or theme.
Here is McNeill on the travails of the English general Cornwallis, besieged with his troops on the malarial peninsula of Yorktown, Va., in the fall of 1781: Most of Cornwallis's men were in their second ague [fever] season in the land of An. Quadrimaculatus [the mosquito that carries malaria in the U.S. South]. At most ten percent had served in the south since 1778 and were thus in their fourth season. In the arduous process of building up malaria resistance his troops lagged about twenty years behind the average A
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