Book review: Parasites: The Inside Story
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Scott Lyell Gardner, Judy Diamond, and Gabor R. Rácz
Illustrated by Brenda Lee
This short and accessible book offers an overview of the mysterious world of parasites. With a series of concise chapters by the three co-authors, insights are provided into parasite life, alongside a few tantalising forays into the tales of those who dedicate their lives to parasitology.
The thirteen essays that comprise the body of the book each stand alone, organised around loose thematic connections. The differing writing styles suggest that each essay was penned by one of the three authors, although this isn’t explicitly stated, so they may have been collaborations. Most essays focus on a specific parasite life cycle, delivering the expected ‘wow’ moments, such as the sheer size of a whale tapeworm (yes, it’s big), and surprisingly few ‘yuk’ moments – though I should mention the existence of the hippo rectum leech.
There was also discussion of the economic and social impacts of parasites, and how these can be mitigated through eradication programmes or behavioural changes. I particularly enjoyed the explorations into evolutionary biology, where the intimate link between parasite and host populations is explained with excellent examples, such as the sled dogs of St Lawrence Island becoming hosts to a tapeworm previously found in Arctic foxes, and the interesting – and disastrous – consequences of that host shift.
The illustrations by Brenda Lee are a curious addition. In her depictions of selected parasite species in the appendix, Lee excels as an observant and informative technical illustrator. However, in the illustrations that accompany each chapter, her skills are applied to a more informal series of parasite life cycles, which can seem repetitive and stilted, adding little beyond the information already provided in the text. In several instances, she is simply asked to draw a map of the relevant geographical area – not the most efficient use of her time or the page space.
It’s difficult to discern the book’s intended audience. In presentation, it resembles a textbook, but the writing adopts a popular science approach. It certainly assumes no prior knowledge of parasitology, and anyone with a general scientific background will find it enjoyable to browse. My main reservation is that the book feels more like a collection of essays than a cohesive whole, despite the essays being well-crafted and interesting. Of the 187 pages, only 115 are dedicated to the main text; the rest comprises the foreword, references, index, and appendix. This is a rather low ratio of content to padding for a popular book, although acceptable for a textbook. In fact, the enjoyable and enlightening appendix was one of the highlights for me, and I don’t understand why it was kept separate. I believe it would have been more effective to integrate this information as boxed sections within the main text, allowing readers to learn more about each parasite species in the context of the essays.
Perhaps the authors recognised this lack of coherence and attempted to address it by introducing a unifying theme. The book has an unexpected emphasis on the dangers of climate change. Let me state that I didn’t disagree with any of this, not even the frankly apocalyptic foreword by Peter Raven. I am a strong advocate for climate science being offered prominence, given its importance. I’m dismayed at recent extraordinary developments in the US – where the authors work – suggesting that this kind of scientific work or even reference to it is being suppressed by the government. However, I found the discussions of this topic distracting. While clearly relevant to parasitology in some ways, it’s not unique to this field, being a global phenomenon. I would have preferred climate change to have been explored more thoroughly in a dedicated essay, where the authors could have explained why they consider it so significant for the study of parasites.
This book is a good read for anyone with a casual interest in parasites, providing a swift overview of a field of study that can be obscure and challenging. I found the book frustrating not because it wasn’t enjoyable or informative – it was both – but because there should have been more of the well-told tales about the parasites and less extraneous material.
Book purchased from NHBS, hardback, priced at £25 at time of writing
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