Life Lessons from a Parasite: What Tapeworms, Flukes, Lice, and Roundworms Can Teach Us About Humanity’s Most Difficult Problems

This underwhelming treatise from Janovy (Letter to a Child Born Today), a biology professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, struggles to distill wisdom from the abilities and life cycles of parasites. Research into parasites’ biology could have practical applications, Janovy contends, suggesting that scientists could hypothetically find ways to adapt the preservative functions of cysts (“capsules” that enclose worm eggs and keep them alive for up to two years) for more effectively transporting drugs and vaccines without refrigeration. Some of the book’s lessons are a bit obvious, as when Janovy cites how free-swimming Salsuginus thalkeni worms follow their plains killifish hosts into “calm backwaters during flood years” as an illustration of how species thrive best when “living in a manner consistent with [their] natural environment,” rather than bending their surroundings to suit their desires as humans do. Elsewhere, Janovy’s “general theory of infectivity” attempts to draw parallels between how ideas and parasites spread. Unfortunately, the takeaways—that both affect their surroundings and the physiological condition of hosts and listeners (by inciting a reaction or change in behavior, in the case of ideas)—are so broad as to offer little insight. This doesn’t come together. Agent: Leslie Meredith, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)