The southern climate, with its heat, oppressive humidity, and stagnant marshland, accentuated disease and suffering for inhabitants of the Old South, from its early settling through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Vicious illnesses—from malaria and yellow fever to dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, and smallpox—beleaguered those dwelling in the South and were blamed on the particular combination of air, earth, and water characteristic of those southern territories. As the rhetoric of southern sectionalism blossomed in the early nineteenth century, so did a growing feeling of southern distinctiveness in health issues. Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South is an examination of the unique circumstances of health and disease that shaped southern living and culture before, during, and after the Civil War. Through archival records, contemporary anecdotes, and scientific literature, Thomas Helling, MD, explores the intricacies of health and healthcare for an agrarian population that, by virtue of its location, was inordinately vulnerable to sicknesses and epidemics. With the influx of enslaved Africans, a new set of healthcare issues were introduced. Given the region’s peculiar climate, ethnic makeup, and customs, southern doctors adopted an attitude of distinctiveness themselves. As a result, southern medical progress became increasingly isolated from northern colleagues. The destructiveness of the Civil War finally provided the impetus for true integration with northern practices in the rapidly changing science of medicine and surgery. Yet, with the regeneration of a medical elitism in postbellum years, southern doctors clung to nostalgic notions of southern culture and southern medical distinctiveness. In this compelling volume, Helling explains how the predominant mindset of southern particularity guided regional interpretation of illness, therapeutic decisions, and medical education, foreboding a healthcare system embedded, still, with institutional racism.

"This tasty 1950s L.A. noir crime novel goes down smoother than an Old Fashioned. Highly recommended." -Best Thrillers Los Angeles, 1954. Sending a pair of mass murderers to the chair got his name in the papers, but veteran fighter pilot turned detective, Augy Small, couldn't celebrate. The culprits confessed, but the cops only ever found one body. Who had the killers died to protect? Katya Tyler, a Russian enigma with a wad of cash in one hand and a hit list in the other, claims to have the answers. First, she wants Augy's help to bring down a massive underground network of human traffickers. As the case unfolds, every clue is an echo of his past. The horrors he experienced in the Pacific, shadows of scars he still carries, and rumors of a place long since destroyed. The Lumbermill is back in operation. Every day more innocents are harvested, their screams muffled in darkness. And the only way Augy can stop it is to go back into the nightmare he thought he'd escaped forever.

"A potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." —Los Angeles Times "A cunning tribute to a classic." —Wall Street Journal "[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” —The New York Times An ingenious novel of historical invention from the global literary star author of The Sound of Things Falling. On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail—from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad’s fame and turned Altamirano’s reality into a work of fiction. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear—Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Vásquez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back in a labyrinthine quest to reclaim the past—of both a country and a man.

Originally published: 1948; copyright renewed: 1976.

**The instant New York Times bestseller.** *An international bestseller.* Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award Finalist for the RBC Taylor Award “Hugely impressive, a major work.”—NPR A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power. The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village. Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.