Book Review

Rats, Lice and History

by Hans Zinsser

     Warfare has always been a part of human existence. So has disease. What if I were to tell you that the two are inextricably linked? That is the point that science historian Hans Zinsser attempts to prove in his semi-classic study Rats, Lice and History. While he makes a sweeping and somewhat superficial survey of Western civilization, he does have enough scientific credibility to prove his point.

This book does not get off to a great start. Although written in the 1930s, the author writes with a prose that resembles Victorian era essays using baroque sentences that meander on for a bit too long with elaborate detailing and excessive description. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I happen to like some 19^th century literature, but it feels a little out of place in the context of this mid-modern text. The first two chapters also left me wondering where the book would be going since they had almost nothing to do with rats, lice, or history. The second chapter, in particular, was a rant against modernist styles in literature where the author makes it clear that he has no appreciation for the likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, or James Joyce.

Moving on from there, Zinsser gives a lengthy overview of trade practices, disease, and warfare as they occurred in ancient times. We hear about the usual Greeks, Romans, and Christians up through the Middle Ages to the voyages of Columbus. By this point in my life I’m getting a little bored of every history scholar writing as if the world outside of Europe didn’t exist before World War II, but I just have to accept that that is how history used to be studied. In any case, the author points out that the use of ships for trade and war did a lot to spread disease since stowaway rats carried infected fleas that regarded the sailors as nothing more than food. Yes, like it or not, people are food.

One of the strongest points of the book’s first half is that diseases often weakened and killed more soldiers than combat actually did. He even goes so far as to make the point that disease could have been a more decisive factor in fighting than military strategy, skill, or execution. Now that is an idea that should deflate the myth of the courageous warrior. The science of the matter is that having large groups of people, be they confined on boats or engaging in military campaigns, in close proximity to each other make it easy for fleas and lice to spread sicknesses throughout the population at a rapid pace. Soldiers returning home or mingling with the people they conquer spread the diseases into the civilian population and then we have epidemics like the Black Death. You have to admit the idea is plausible and with Zinsser’s background in biology, he uses his knowledge of entomology to support the point.

After about one hundred pages of what eventually sounds like a bunch of babbling about wars, the narrative really takes off as Zinsser examines historical writings to locate the first mention of typhus. There isn’t much in the historical record that corresponds with the modern understanding of typhus symptoms and its origins are murky at best, but he develops a theory, one that he admits is not strong, that typhus originated in Asia and was spread by sea merchants to Western Europe via Cyprus during the Renaissance.

From there, Zinsser takes a big leap into the subject of human-animal relationships with chapters describing lice, mice, rats, and fleas which, along with humans, form a pentangonal track for typhus to travel along. His opinion of lice is surprisingly sympathetic while his take on rats is not so hot. Lice, he claims, are actually neutral vectors that catch typhus from humans. When they reproduce, they pass the typhus on to their offspring which spread among the human population and spread the disease further amongst humans. Typhus actually kills the host lice so spreading the disease does not benefit them in any way. They are innocent vermin that just happened to get caught in the crossfire of a war between humans and a disease. Rats, on the other hand, are nothing but pests according to the author. He thinks they serve no purpose in the world other than to cause problems. They are, in fact, part of the food chain and being the scavengers that they are, their ecological function in the world is to clean up the messes left by other creature like us. That is why they thrive in places that are full of human-made garbage. Useless? I hardly think so. But regardless of what you believe, the truth is that mice carry the fleas that transmit typhus to rats and those fleas transmit typhus to humans. The humans transmit it to lice and the lice transmit it to other humans. It’s a grim way of looking at people, but we do have to be reminded from time to time that we are not the magnificent species we claim to be. We might actually be little more than a dangerous parasite if looked at from Planet Earth’s point of view. In any case, this portion of the book is fascinating and brilliant; you can really see Zinsser at his best in these passages.

The rest of the book is all about typhus and he gets around to pointing out how bad of a problem it was during World War I. This brings up an interesting dilemma. If this book was inspired by the aftermath of World War I, is it fair to say that the event overly influenced the author in his analysis and conclusions? Or did the post-war realities shine a light onto a previously unexplored matter of human history, medical science, and entomology? I can’t say for myself because I know absolutely nothing about typhus or the science of epidemics. But I can say this book made me look at humanity in a new light which is saying a lot considering the thousands of books I have read in my lifetime.

Since the 1930s, scientists have learned a lot about typhus and other illnesses so it is fair to assume that some of the information in this book is dated. But Rats, Lice and History poses a significant question about human nature and our history. If wars are the primary way in which diseases spread and become epidemics or pandemics, wouldn’t it make sense to fight less of them or even eliminate them altogether? I have no idea how we could accomplish that, but if that question is the biggest takeaway you can get from this book, then the message transcends any dated scientific ideas it may contain. I’d say that the way Hans Zinsser presented just enough evidence to make that question stick in my mind is reason enough for it to be worth reading, even almost one hundred years after its initial publication. 

 

Book Review

Gentleman of Leisure:

A Year In the Life Of a Pimp

by Susan Hall & Bob Adelman

     There is such a thing as Battered Woman Syndrome which, I believe, is a sub-category of PTSD.

Now imagine it’s late on a freezing cold night in January, somewhere in New York City. A line of prostitutes are standing along a sidewalk in the yellowish light of a street lamp. One of them is thinking these thoughts: “I wish a trick would come along soon. It’s freezing out here, but what else can I do? My pimp will give me hell if I don’t bring him some money tonight. I’m so sick of this life. Maybe I should just take what little cash I earned tonight, go down to Port Authority, and take the next bus out of here. It wouldn’t matter. He’d find me anywhere. He knows where my family lives, even said he’d kill them if I ever left. I wouldn’t mind working for him so much if he would spend more time with me the way he used to. He used to be so much fun. He’d take me out and we’d have the greatest time of my life, but now he spends most of his time with his other girls, the bitches. He bought them all diamond rings for Christmas and what did he give me? Just a lousy silver ring and a pair of cheap high heels that broke after two nights of streetwalking. He’s been vicious lately too, all that money we give him going up his nose. Then the last time I tried to quit this life, he beat me. Just when I felt so alone and so in need of love, he stopped hitting me and in such a sweet, soft voice he said he loves me and wants to be with me forever. He said he’ll change and treat me better from now on. How could I say no? No one else was there for me. Besides, he says if I turn tricks for one more year he’ll have saved enough money to buy me a beauty salon of my own and I can quit this shitty life for good. Just one more year...”

I bring up Battered Woman Syndrome because all the prostitutes in Gentleman of Leisure: A Year In the Life Of a Pimp display symptoms of this mental disorder. Symptoms include believing that they did something to deserve repeated physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, fear for the safety of themselves or loved ones, disassociation from their own bodies, irrational fear that their abuser is omnipotent or omnipresent, as well as the idea that things will get better if they only wait a little while longer. Repeated blows to the head can cause brain injuries that lead to confused thinking and poor judgment. The abuser in these situations uses methods of manipulation and coercion, control over finances, control over sexual behavior, physical violence, alternating patterns of abuse and tenderness, and promises of a brighter future to keep their victims on a leash, figuratively speaking. Pimps learn these coercion techniques from other pimps. Prostitutes who are enslaved by them often suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. This is what goes on in this unique book.

Gentleman of Leisure started as a photo-journalism project by Bob Adelson, the acclaimed photographer of the Civil Rights Movement. It turned into a literary project as well when the subject pimp, named Silky, and his stable of hookers agreed to be interviewed about their lives. They were surprisingly candid to the point where it is hard to believe this isn’t fiction.

Silky is a sweet-talking, charismatic guy who wears flashy clothes and drives a custom-made car. If you’ve ever seen Blaxploitation movies from the 1970s, you would recognize his kind. On the surface, he seems like a great person to be around, but after getting to know him a bit you realize he is nothing but a predator. He says he prefers pimping white women because Black women are harder to control, but he also admits he has a chip on his shoulder because of slavery and feels that by enslaving white women he is paying society back. And he seems to have almost absolute control over his girls.

But Silky does not do most of the talking throughout the book. We learn more about him through the monologues of the prostitutes who work for him. All of them feel like they are in a committed relationship with him. Sandy is the one he has the most intimate conversations with, Kitty is the one he has the most sex with, Linda is the one he takes out on dates the most. He claims he loves Linda the most, although he beats her when she doesn’t “behave”. Actually, all of them get beaten but Silky says he regrets having to do that. He also makes sure his string of ladies are all jealous of each other in order to keep them from working together against him. They refer to each other as wives-in-law, tolerating the others because their sense of self-worth is low and they depend on Silky because they think they can not live without his protection. You really get a sense of how sick Silky is in a passage where he babysits Kitty’s three year old daughter and begins grooming her for “the lifestyle”.

The author, Linda Hall, and the photographer, Bob Adelman, do not offer any commentary of their own. Their presence in the book is largely unnoticeable. They let their subjects speak for themselves. It isn’t hard to interpret what they say. Silky, whose thoughts are oblivious to anyone’s feelings but his own, is a narcissistic abuser while the women he controls relay anecdotes about living a life they hate. This is matched and contrasted with photographs that show Silky with each woman, sometimes having fun, sometimes being romantic, and sometimes with bruises and lumps on their faces after a beating. This is a book that shows without telling. Some people might criticize Hall and Adelson for not explicitly stating a moral stance, but such pedantry would only diminish and ruin the harsh impact that this book is apparently meant to have.

Gentleman of Leisure is a wretched book about a side of life that most people would feel more comfortable ignoring. Don’t take the easy way out. It lays out everything for you to see like the exposed guts of a freshly slaughtered cow. It’s a book that invites you in to peep like a voyeur at a lifestyle you ordinarily would ignore and then socks you in the gut to show you how terrible these women’s live are. If you go away from this book without feeling some sense of disgust, sadness, sorrow, pity, or depression, you’re probably emotionally dead, mostly likely suffering from some form of psychopathy, the inability to feel empathy for other human beings.

 

Book Review

Six-Legged Soldiers

Using Insects as Weapons of War

by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

     If insects make you nervous, Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s Six-Legged Soldiers isn’t going to do anything to ease your anxieties. That is why you might want to read it; things that make you uncomfortable must be inherently interesting, right? Even if you love bugs, there still might be something interesting here. (Did I just make an error of judgment? “Bugs” is a pejorative term for insects so I guess it is extremely offensive to oppressed animals. I can hear the raging horde of woke wasps coming after me on Twitter to make sure I get canceled. The joke’s on you because I don’t have a Twitter account.) But despite the interesting subject matter, the realized product of Lockwood’s research is less than stellar.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that insects were being used as weapons of war in ancient times. What could be more detrimental to an army’s morale than being splattered with honey then having a beehive launched into the middle of your battalion? Or how about being routed into a swampy area where malaria-carrying mosquitoes live in abundance? How well can an army fight after some digestive parasite gives them migraine headaches, dizzying fever, double visions, and explosive diarrhea? Those annoying little critters are sometimes deadly, they exist in abundance, and are free for the taking. Why not use them as weapons? It sure beats hand to hand combat where soldier risk getting skewered on a sword, beheaded, or dismembered. Don’t take it too deeply into consideration though because all manner of vermin are hard to control; they don’t obey orders, they don’t go where you want them to, and they are just as likely to attack your own army as they are to attack the enemy’s. A little human ingenuity is necessary here.

So this is where Lockwood starts. From prehistoric times to our own age, people have attempted to use insects as weapons, some more successfully than others. As any broad-scoped popular history book would, this one starts out with the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the predecessors. It draws on the Old Testament as a source, and then looks at a few examples from the Middle Ages. Most of these attempts at militarizing insects are bumbling, awkward failures. Some of the passages are simply conjectural guesswork as to whether or not insects were militarized or what kinds of them were actually used. The author uses science to guess what really happened in these battles, drawing on the symptoms of illnesses and his expertise in entomology to draw some shaky conclusions. The writing is just as awkward, uneven, and bumbling as the historical attempts at fighting enemies with swarms of unruly pests were. I really take issue with the way he dwells so much on the Bible in an attempt to engage the reader. He writes as if he doesn’t have any real interest in Biblical studies, but he wants to throw this stuff in there on the assumption that a lot of religious people without any interest in science might want to read this. This kind of pandering doesn’t do the subject matter justice.

The following sections on World War II and the Cold War are much more interesting and well-written. Lockwood writes about Japan’s infamous Unit 731, the biological warfare laboratory that used living humans as subjects for experimentation. Shiro Ishii, the Japanese equivalent of Nazi Germany’s Josef Mengele, oversaw a project to develop bombs that would spread vector fleas infected with bubonic plague all over China. This is the most chilling part of the book and what makes it even worse is that Ishii was never brought to trial for war crimes; instead America let him off the hook in exchange for the extensive experimental records that were kept in the facility.

Meanwhile, the Americans began running their own biological and insectan warfare program in Maryland’s Fort Detrick. The scientists there went as far as dropping mosquito bombs in Arkansas, as if that state needs any more mosquitoes than they already have, to see how fast a plague could potentially develop. Also of interest during the Cold War were accusations against America during the Korean War of spreading disease-carrying swarms of fleas in China and North Korea. Fidel Castro also became obsessive about accusing America of launching crop-killing potato bugs into Cuba. Maybe that was a result of Operation Mongoose where the CIA tried spiking his drinks with LSD. Lockwood does an interesting job of analyzing whether or not these charges, broughght against the U.S.A. at the United Nations, were based on fact or if they were merely propaganda campaigns.

The final section of the book covers present and future uses of insects as agents of military use.

The author’s writing is uneven. As mentioned before, the chapters on ancient uses of vermin for war were clumsy. The book really takes off in the twentieth century chapters, but even there it is a bit of a letdown. It turns out that insects in the Cold War era were used more as symbolic weapons in propaganda campaigns then they were in actual combat. Experiments with insects as biological warfare tools have also been inefficient and ineffective. So while this section of the book is more interesting and better-written, the subject matter wears a little thin. It also seems like the proof-reader stopped paying attention towards the end of the book because the last chapters are so full of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors that it becomes difficult to read at times.

Six-Legged Soldiers has potential to be a more interesting read than it is. If Jeffrey Lockwood spent more time on the actual writing, it would be better. Still, the subject matter is interesting enough to make it worth reading once. Plus the thought of the Japanese and American militaries mass-breeding insects, infecting them with diseases, and using them in warfare against civilian populations is scary enough to make you keep you awake at night. I’m not an advocate of insomnia, but I fear if we become too comfortable we will also become too complacent and that is not a good thing.