J. R. McNeill . Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 . (New Approaches to the Americas.) New York : Cambridge University Press . 2010 . Pp. xviii, 371. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.99.

Abstract

My post‐retirement writing project is a biography of my father, who was a young petroleum geologist in Mexico and South America from 1926 to 1933. He endured two protracted sojourns at Lake Maracaibo, northern Venezuela's dangerous disease environment where many colleagues caught malaria, one acquaintance died from it, and a close friend lost the use of a leg owing to a misplaced quinine injection. My father subsequently spent an entire rainy season in the llanos of central Colombia, a region renowned for its high density of disease‐carrying mosquitoes. Although J. R. McNeill's new book covers an earlier historical period, reading it has been invaluable for reviewing my manuscript in progress, helping me to re‐emphasize and rethink important points, and reinforcing my amazement that my father never contracted malaria. McNeill's book is at once a review of familiar facts and a presentation of a thoroughly researched, clearly articulated thematic approach that is altogether new. The “Greater Caribbean” in the subtitle extends from northeast Brazil to the Chesapeake Bay and includes the Mexican and United States Gulf Coasts, an enormous arc of the New World tropics and subtropics that is far more extensive than what most of us envision as “Caribbean.” McNeill's insight throws an entirely new light on understanding major events in the European colonization and decolonization of much of this vast area.