Richard Russo’s latest novel “hits the
ball out of the park,” said Mameve
Medwed in The Boston Globe. Show-
ing as always “his wry eye for irony
and regret,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning
author of Empire Falls brings together
three men in their mid-60s for a friendly
Martha’s Vineyard reunion that comes
44 years after they last convened on
the island. On that previous holiday
weekend, a fourth friend—a young
woman they had all loved—had dis-
appeared, and the presence of that
lingering mystery turns Chances Are...
into “a gripping, wise, and wonderful
summer treat.” The mystery plot is
actually pretty silly, said Ron Charles
in The Washington Post. Worse, the
novel’s dependence on that storyline
“doubles down on the hackneyed cliché
of the tragic, unattainable beauty.” But
Russo remains an “undeniably endear-
ing” writer: “No one captures so well
the gruff affection of men.” And in this
uneven novel, he gives three friends the
opportunity to marvel over life’s unpre-
dictable turns and, better yet, a chance
to see the whole journey anew.(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Never underestimate that tiny insect whin-
ing in your ear, said Keith Johnson in
Foreign Policy. “The mosquito, far and
away mankind’s deadliest enemy, has
killed half of all the people who have ever
lived.” Per the calculations of historian
Timothy C. Winegard, 52 billion people in
all have died of malaria, yellow fever, and
other mosquito-borne diseases, making the
tiny pest the malevolent Zelig to our own
species’ long journey through the ages.
Winegard “finds no shortage of pivotal
events to pin on the little critter.” The rise
of Rome into an empire was aided by the
invader-proof malarial swamps that sur-
rounded the city. Mosquitoes also ended
Alexander the Great’s campaigns. And
they were major contributors to the British
defeat at Yorktown. Though Winegard’s
book is sometimes florid and sometimes
repetitive, it “serves up an eye-opening,
deeply alarming, and absolutely engrossing
“Few books have
enthralled, incensed,
and haunted me as
The Volunteer has,”
said Neal Bascomb
in The Wall Street
Journal. Its subject,
Witold Pilecki, was
a Polish resistance
fighter who in
1940 volunteered
to enter Ausch witz
as a prisoner so he
could alert the world to the slaughter and
torture the Nazis were committing inside
the camp. Pilecki’s unfathomable heroism
might have saved a million lives had the
detailed reports he produced been heeded,
but Allied leaders instead did nothing. Only
decades after the war did details of Pilecki’s
efforts emerge, and we are fortunate that
former Washington Post war correspondent
Jack Fairweather dug in further. “This is
a story that has deserved a robust, faithful
telling, and he has delivered it.”
Book of the week
view of humanity’s most tenacious foe.”
“There is very little of human history
mosquitoes have not touched,” said Brian
Bethune in Maclean’s. Though we’ve only
known for a century that it is the mos-
quito, not “bad air,” that spreads malaria,
humans have been in a fierce battle with
the disease since the dawn of agriculture.
About 8,000 years ago, when Bantu farm-
ers in West Central Africa expanded their
territory, the malaria parasite was waiting
for them, and it proved so deadly that
our bodies developed emergency genetic
defenses, including sickle-cell anemia, a
disorder that defends blood cells against
the parasite but regularly results in death
at about age 23. Five centuries ago,
mosquito-borne diseases carried from the
Old World to the New helped wipe out
95 percent of the Americas’ indigenous
population. And because Africans had
greater immunity to the illnesses than white
indentured servants, millions of Africans
were enslaved to serve as the New World’s
labor class.
Winegard sometimes gives the mosquito
too much credit, said Brooke Jarvis in The
New Yorker. His case for the mosquito’s
role in the drafting of the Magna Carta, for
example, relies on “a cascade of contingen-
cies” stretching back centuries. But we who
live in rich, temperate corners of the world
are foolish if we presume that the mosquito
has had its day in the human story. Climate
change is expanding the reach of the genus
and the diseases it carries. Though we
think we are in control of our future, “the
entire time that humanity has been in exis-
tence, the mosquito has been proof that we
are not.”
The Mosquito: A Human History
of Our Deadliest Predator
by Timothy C. Winegard (Dutton, $28)
Novel of the week
Chances Are...
by Richard Russo (Knopf, $27)
The Volunteer: One Man,
an Underground Army,
and the Secret Mission to
Destroy Auschwitz
by Jack Fairweather (Custom House, $29)
This book is “not for the fainthearted,”
said Giles Milton in The Sunday Times
(U.K.). In his first hours in the camp,
Pilecki saw guards gun down a line of
men as they stepped off a train, and there
is “scarcely a page” of Fair weather’s
account that passes without a new atrocity.
Pilecki’s first dispatches reached Poland’s
government-in-exile in London, then Win-
ston Chur chill, by Decem ber 1940; later
Pilecki’s reports described the construction
of gas chambers and put numbers on the
total victims, by then most of them Jewish.
But his calls for bombing the camp were
rejected in Lon don and Wash ing ton. Some
officials deemed the reports propaganda.
Anti- Semitism also played a role; no one
wanted it thought that the war was being
fought on behalf of Jews.
Pilecki escaped Auschwitz in 1943, but even
after the Nazis’ defeat, his work wasn’t
celebrated, said The Economist. In 1947,
he turned to gathering evidence of Soviet
atrocities in Poland, leading to his arrest
and 1948 execution. Fair weather’s biogra-
phy does more than honor one of the war’s
great unsung heroes. It reminds us that too
many of us see history only through the
lens of our own national dramas. “Then, as
now, non-Western stories and viewpoints
are all too often overlooked.”
In India, a health worker sprays for mosquitoes.
AP