THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 71
highlight reel). Winegard notes that
wealthy Romans built their houses on
hilltops to escape mosquitoes, and says
that the fad has continued to the pres-
ent, with U.S. houses on hills selling at
a notable markup. “Add the real estate
market to the mosquito’s portfolio of in-
fluence,” he concludes, ignoring other
possible reasons for this preference. His
argument that mosquitoes are respon-
sible for the Magna Carta and, there-
fore, modern democracy is a cascade of
contingencies: the failure of Louis VII’s
siege of Damascus during the malaria
season of 1148 led to his separation from
Eleanor of Aquitaine, which led her to
marry Henry II of England, which led
to the birth to King John, who sparred
with his barons. Winegard doesn’t need
these double-jointed reaches to persuade
us of the hidden influence mosquitoes
have had in shaping history and creat-
ing the world that we know today.
In these days of insecticides and
drained swamps, those of us who live
in the rich, temperate world have be-
come accustomed to the luxury of not
thinking very much about mosquitoes
and the risks they carry. But the insects
are still killing more than eight hun-
dred thousand people a year, primar-
ily in Africa. Winegard’s reminder of
their enormous potential for destruction
is a timely one for all of us. Globaliza-
tion is helping to spread a new gener-
ation of mosquito-borne illnesses once
confined to the tropics, such as dengue,
perhaps a thousand years old, and chi-
kungunya and Zika, both of which were
first identified in humans only in 1952.
Meanwhile, climate change is dramat-
ically expanding the ranges in which
mosquitoes and the diseases they carry
can thrive. One recent study estimated
that, within the next fifty years, a billion
more people could be exposed to mos-
quito-borne infections than are today.
Centuries later, it’s easy to read the
tale of the failed Scottish colony in Pan-
ama as a farce: all that wool in the trop-
ics, the printing press on the empty beach,
an assault of pure optimism foundering
against a deadly reality. Yet we modern
folk are also guilty of believing that our
hopes and our technology will somehow
make us exempt from the workings of
the natural world. The entire time that
humanity has been in existence, the mos-
quito has been proof that we are not.
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent (Scribner). America’s
most successful anti-migrant campaign used laws instead of
walls. This sweeping history outlines how, in 1924, the Im-
migration Restriction League won passage of legislation that
targeted Italians, Jews, and other “tainted aliens.” Okrent
delves into the eugenics movement, which brought together
misguided scientists and master-race theorists and offered
the country’s most powerful men a way to launder their big-
otry with faux objectivity. Credulous outlets, including the
Times and Scribner’s, promoted eugenicist ideas, and helped
convince the public that “unfit” races were poisoning white
America’s genetic pool. Calvin Coolidge, stumping for the
bill, provided a rallying cry that today sounds unnervingly
familiar: “America must be kept American.”Lotharingia, by Simon Winder (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In-
terlacing history and travelogue, this prose journey from Lake
Constance up through the Low Countries is an exuberant,
exhaustive paean to “the richness and density of a region that
is both the dozy back end of beyond, and central to the fate
of humanity.” Winder, at once waggish and sincere, covers
subjects including the polymathic nun Hildegard von Bin-
gen, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of spermatozoa,
and the Great War dead in a tiny village in Belgium. His lov-
ing description of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings could apply
to his own work: “hundreds of small details which are almost
needlessly bravura but which successfully make the taken-
for-granted sensational again.”Fleishman Is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random
House). The title character of this mordant début novel is a
hepatologist navigating a divorce. Between attending to his re-
bellious daughter and curious son, he juggles hospital duties
and dating-app exchanges. Having married young, he now
finds himself, in his early forties, being sized up physically,
financially, and professionally, and comes to question long-held
assumptions—that virtue naturally leads to success, and that
he is lovable and loved. Imagining that his wife is living a bet-
ter version of her life, he feels trapped in no-win situations: he
despises his peers and finds fault with his superiors at work,
while romantic encounters leave him reflecting on how a lov-
ing marriage can end up with two people siloed in despair.The Travelers, by Regina Porter (Hogarth). An act of violence
sets this kaleidoscopic début novel in motion. In the course of
fifty years, starting in the mid-fifties, the members of two
American families—one black, one white—tumble together,
break apart, disappear, and reëmerge. The cast of characters
includes a lesbian who escapes the Deep South for Berlin, a
damaged but loving black Vietnam vet, and an English pro-
fessor forced to reckon with his white privilege while raising
biracial children. Porter deftly skips back and forth through
the decades, sometimes summarizing a life in a few paragraphs,
sometimes spending pages on one conversation. As one char-
acter observes, “We move in circles in this life.”