This book chronicles how bugs have played a part in world history. The book brings a new perspective to history. Students are able to study new avenues that might not appear in traditional history books. This is a good read that might convince students to do more research. ( )

This book had some fascinating tidbits about human interactions with bugs. It is organized chronologically for the most part. Tracing the role of insects in disease, scientific discovery, and world ecology.
The book was easy to read in short bits with some parts being just a paragraph or side bar.
As a whole, this book paints of picture of the importance of insects in history. But it doesn't read smoothly as a narrative. ( )

Fantastic way to get students interested in History.

From the author who brought you Poop Happened, this one is all about insects. Lots of great information entertainingly presented with plenty of disgusting details and cheeky humor. ( )

Let me begin by saying I enjoyed this book. That being said, it is not without its difficulties, but most of these are minor. My biggest concern is that nowhere in the book where one might expect to find such things is there any mention of the author's qualifications to be writing about history or entomology. Albee is a pleasant enough writer, but there is no mention of her in the book at all. The sources she has both in the "further readings" appendix (pgs.153-156) as well as the chapter by chapter bibliography (pgs 157-162) are fairly extensive and seem to be unbiased, and the author's acknowledgements indicate that at least the people who helped develop the text are fairly knowledgible and unbiased as well.

My second complaint is a stylistic and aesthetic choice by either the autor or the publisher in that all the inks involved are a disquieting purple or green, including the photos and reproduced artwork; though font size is good, the purple text is a little wearing on the eyes. The cartoons that illustrate the book serve more as an attention grabber for the casual reader than a means of promoting the history being presented. The tone of the book is relatively narrative, though slightly sensationalized in some of the excerpts on specific nasty insect bites or disease symptoms. The introduction does caution you about this when its third paragraph, directly after a subheading: "Dont say I didn't warn you", states "This book is full of death, disease, and disgusting details about some of the most horrible events in human history." It also sets a tone of fun but not frivolous fact in the next paragraph, while acknowledging its lack of depth: "To avoid making this book ten quintillion pages long, I had to flit through world history, mayfly-like, which was hard because so many topics are really fascinating and deserve more in-depth treatment."

The illustrator and the layout editor make up for their poor ink choice by using amusing caricatures of historical figures and concepts, as well as slightly anthropomorphized insects, relevant portraits and other depictions of historical figures, and a few maps to help guide understanding. The inserts are a bit distractiong at first, and really quite numerous, but the author refers back to them throughout the book, providing pagenumbers when the aside would be useful. There are boldfaced words with a glossary in the back attached, but these aren't common; it seems brevity and scarcity of terms were favored over comprehensive vocabulary. Most of the terms highlighted were ones that require more than a few simple synonyms or five-word explanations, so the choice is fairly justified. This book walks a fine line between the expected gross out (which it labels with "too much information" warnings in its sidebars) and the historical truth.

Rather than tracing the political history of humans, the book traces the effects bugs and humans have had on one another, primarily in the transmission of infectious diseases and the use of pesticides. This could easily have become another ecological tirade, but the book stops short of any kind of significant environmental stance. The main point the author is making becomes clear if one reads the book as a whole: humans and insects have affected one another more than the former is willing to admit. This wide view necessitates a lack of some depth, though the asides and sidebars do add to it: the "Insect Aside" inserts with the green backgrounds insert valuable factual tidbits that help bring some depth to the otherwise wide-reaching book. The unique idea of focusing on the effects bugs and the diseases they bear on history allows the author a lot of leeway when it comes to the complexities of the times mentioned. For example, though it would have been easy to focus on Rome, the author points out the Roman obsession with that uniquely Chinese product, silk, and the insects that created it. It also goes on to explain that the trading network known as the Silk Road was potentially a corridor along which disease could pass, through contact and through flying insects. It describes one of the decisions by Rome as a reaction to disease-driven population depletion; concerning the Germans running from the invading Huns: "The Romans permitted some of these tribes to stay, and to hang on to their weapons, in a frantic bargain to help fend off the Huns. Tactical error? Probably, but the Romans were desperate. Forty years later one of those tribes, the Visigoths, attacked Rome and nearly destroyed it. But before it was completely flattened, the Visigoth king, Alaric I, died of a sudden fever, which seems likely to have been Malaria." It then traces the effects of moving to the temperate areas of northern Europe, and the lack of movement between cities; stultifying for academia, it was a necessary evil to help a devastated Europe recover from the diseases that helped tear down the Roman empire. The book is fairly Euro-centric in this regard, but it is careful to make sure that people do not forget about other areas as well. The Chapter titles are amusing and chronological, with the chapter divisions being littered with puns: Ch. 8 More thinking but Still Stinking: the Renaissance; first heading: The Dung and the Restless. Or perhaps Ch 10's first division heading: The reign of Spain is Plainly on the Wane, These instances of humor help lighten the mood in an otherwise gloomy (Or atleast disgusting and depressing) subject.

The book does spend a lot of time explaining and reiterating one fact: humans did not consider insects means by which disease could spread untilrelatively recently in human history, 1890's or so. In the time from this discovery to today, we have arrested the spread of many diseases and the species of insects that cause them. The last chapter has a distinctly more ominous tone as it begins to caution young readers about the dangers of some of our more blunt insect control methods, especially DDT. This book is NOT for young readers who want to lean more about the wondrous and dangerous world of insects, bugs, and other creepy-crawly things, but it will intrigue them and hopefully pique their interest in history. It's also not for the youngest of the aspiring entomologists: a clever first grader might be able to handle this, but it really would do better in the second through fourth grades, speaking strictly from the word choice and sentence structure. However, this book would not be out of place in an older classroom full of history buffs who would like another perspective to the politically based one they typically get in class. Although I wouldn't use the whole book in my Latin classes, I might use excerpts from it, and it would definitely enhance the UNO collection, as well as any middle school classroom library (primarily history). UNO's collection of young adult targeted books on insects or history is fairly wide but the intersect that this book occupires, between environment and history, is not very extensive. ( )