Ian Pindar reviews William Rosen's Justianian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, in which a "flea looms as large as an emperor." Sound like an unlikely read? Apparently not.
Without having read it (yet!), it puts me in mind of the delightfully misanthropic Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever by Hans Zinsser.
Zinsser accomplished the unlikely feat of engaging our sympathy for that much maligned pathogen host: "Man is too prone to look upon all nature through his egocentric eyes. To the louse, we are the dreaded emissaries of death. He leads a relatively harmless life --- the result of centuries of adaptations; then, out of the blue, an epidemic occurs; his host sickens, and the only world he has ever known becomes pestilential and deadly; and if, as a result of circumstances not under his control, his stricken body is transferred to another host whom he, in turn, infects. He does so without guile, from the uncontrollable need for nourishment, with death already in his own entrails. If only for his fellowship with us in suffering, he should command a degree of sympathetic consideration."
Looks like Rosen might have done the same for the flea.
