446. Mass Murderer Still at Large

BROWDERBOOKS


Here it is at last: the cover of New Yorkers, my new nonfiction title.  

It will soon be available in both print and e-book formats, once certain matters are settled with the two POD (print on demand) printers for self-published books, Amazon and IngramSpark.

Admittedly, it's a gamble, for the illustration is subtle.  Every time I look at it, I recognize a new detail that says New York.  As for  instance:

• taxis, buses, bikes, and subway trains
• hearts, as in I (heart) New York
• a sidewalk vendor's cart with an umbrella
• a man jogging
• an old lamppost that forms an inverted U at the top
• a TV screen
• apples (the Big Apple)
• high heels (fashion)
• arrows, suggesting movement (New Yorkers are always in motion)
• BE: people come here to be, or become, themselves
• DO: New Yorkers are great doers, always busy

And so on.  There are icons I have yet to decipher.  Some may be indecipherable.  But by all means have a go at it.  It's fun.

But will this register with prospective buyers surfing the Internet?  I doubt if subtlety sells books.  But the two alternatives that my design team offered me -- crowded streets and traffic squeezed in between soaring buildings, seen by day or night -- were the familiar vision of the city, whereas this is strikingly original.  I fell in love with it at first glance and have never regretted my choice.  

For my other books, go here.


                 MASS  MURDERER
                  STILL  AT  LARGE

                         Her Many Royal Victims

She strikes at many times in many places, and the list of her victims is impressive:

• Alexander the Great at Babylon in 323 BCE, ending his planned march into Arabia and North Africa, and setting off a bloody fight among his followers as they carved up the vast territories he had conquered.
• The Visigothic king Alaric in 410 CE, after sacking the city of Rome, but with Italy still to conquer.
• Oliver Cromwell in 1658, a good Puritan who refused to take quinine, which he associated with the Jesuits, thus making way (1) for the Stuart restoration in 1660, and (2) countless films and romance novels in the twentieth century idealizing the colorful (and morally slack) Cavaliers, while denigrating those strict, righteous, drab, and depressing Puritans.
• Lord Byron in Greece in 1824, thus making him a hero of the Greek fight for liberation from Turkish rule, and refurbishing his image as hopelessly depraved, an image that had driven him from Restoration England (itself a bit depraved) into exile.

        Had it not been for this ruthless female killer, it has been suggested, Greek might have become the lingua franca (lingua graeca?) of the Western world, Italy might be speaking German today, England might not be a monarchy, and Lord Byron might have become King George Gordon the First of Greece.  A bit far-fetched, perhaps, but not impossible.

          It should be obvious by now to readers that the murderer discussed here is not a human, but an ailment, a murderous disease. Bubonic plague?  Guess again.  Small pox?  Cholera?  The flu?  Wrong again.  The disease involved is malaria, carried by certain species of the mosquito genus Anopheles, whose bloodsucking females are carriers of various disease-causing parasites, one of those diseases being malaria.  And we know whose blood they are sucking, but one might ask, Why?  Because, in the insidious biological scheme of things, female mosquitos need blood for  protein and other nutrients necessary for developing eggs.  Without our blood, they could not reproduce.  So we humans are linked to them by nature -- or whoever you want to blame for your summer mosquito bites, and for the world killer malaria, plus yellow fever. The total number of deaths from mosquitos throughout human history?  An estimated 52 billion, almost half of all deaths in human history.

Female mosquito

           Interesting, in a depressing way, but what has it to do with New York, the subject of this blog?  Malaria does not plague us here, but in the early nineteenth century every summer brought an epidemic of yellow fever, caused by the mosquito Aedes aegypti.  So great a threat, in fact, that well-to-do merchants took their families north, out of the range of the disease, to a sparsely settled community known as Greenwich Village.  Then, finding that they could commute from there to their office or store in the city, they decided to buy property and build homes in this quiet, healthy neighborhood.  The result: the handsome Greek Revival residences, most of them built in the 1830s, found throughout the Village -- my neighborhood -- today.

Here she is, at work on human skin.
JJ Harrison

          Here I will add a personal note.  All my life I have noticed that, in picnics and other social gatherings that lingered into the early evening hours of summer, I was always the first one bitten.  I would feel an itching around my ankles, while everyone else was blithely unaware, at first, of the presence of these bloodsucking little predators.  I have long since vowed to never kill spiders, since they kill flies and mosquitos.  I have embraced that old saying,

                         If you wish to live and thrive,

                         Let a spider run alive.

If I find a spider in my apartment, I gently deposit it outside a window, so it can find a nearby garden to settle in, spin its web, and kill mosquitos and other pests.

          The name "malaria" suggests "bad air," but bad air did not cause or facilitate the spread of malaria; water did, since it helps mosquitos breed.  And today, with our greater knowledge of mosquitos and the diseases they spread, are these tiny creatures less of a threat?  No way.  In 2018 they killed an estimated 830,000 humans.  How come?  Because of population density: we live in far more congested circumstances than in the past, therefore are more vulnerable.  And the poorest and most deprived among us are the most vulnerable to mosquito-borne illnesses.  When I traveled years ago in the tropical regions of Mexico, everywhere I saw signs warning of paludismo, meaning "malaria."  Today malaria is chiefly confined to rural areas of Mexico not visited by tourists.  But in many parts of the world it's definitely a problem.  Anopheles is still winning the war.

          The villain of the story is the female.  So what are male mosquitos doing all this time?  Sucking nectar and other juices from plants.  But we can't let him off the hook entirely, since he breeds with the female and therefore facilitates her depredations.  But when you hear that familiar high-pitched zzzzzzz at night, you can be sure it's a female after your blood.

Source note:  This post was inspired by "Suckers," David Quammen's review of "The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator," by Timothy C. Winegard, in The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2019.  Many of the facts I cite are taken by Quammen from Winegard's work.

Coming soon:  Monsters: Legend, Fact, and Horror

©   2020   Clifford Browder