Examines how insects have been used as weapons in wartime conflicts throughout history, presenting as examples how scorpions were used in Roman times and hornets nests were used during the MIddle Ages in siege warfare and how insects have been used in Vietnam, China, and Korea.

The human reaction to insects is neither purely biological nor simply cultural. And no one reacts to insects with indifference. Insects frighten, disgust and fascinate us. Jeff Lockwood explores this phenomenon through evolutionary science, human history, and contemporary psychology, as well as a debilitating bout with entomophobia in his work as an entomologist. Exploring the nature of anxiety and phobia, Lockwood explores the lively debate about how much of our fear of insects can be attributed to ancestral predisposition for our own survival and how much is learned through individual experiences. Drawing on vivid case studies, Lockwood explains how insects have come to infest our minds in sometimes devastating ways and supersede even the most rational understanding of the benefits these creatures provide. No one can claim to be ambivalent in the face of wasps, cockroaches or maggots but our collective entomophobia is wreaking havoc on the natural world as we soak our food, homes and gardens in powerful insecticides. Lockwood dissects our common reactions, distinguishing between disgust and fear, and invites readers to consider their own emotional and physiological reactions to insects in a new framework that he's derived from cutting-edge biological, psychological, and social science.

Discusses an elite group that is trained to do very difficult missions.

Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country." From the Dakotas to Texas, from California to Iowa, the swarms pushed thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation, prompting the federal government to enlist some of the greatest scientific minds of the day and thereby jumpstarting the fledgling science of entomology. Over the next few decades, the Rocky Mountain locust suddenly -- and mysteriously -- vanished. A century later, Jeffrey Lockwood set out to discover why. Unconvinced by the reigning theories, he searched for new evidence in musty books, crumbling maps, and crevassed glaciers, eventually piecing together the elusive answer: A group of early settlers unwittingly destroyed the locust's sanctuaries just as the insect was experiencing a natural population crash. Drawing on historical accounts and modern science, Locust brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late-nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest ecological mysteries of our time.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

Larkville hero comes home Returning Special Forces soldier Nate Calhoun is struggling to adjust to small-town life. It's a relief to get back to the bunkhouse with only his memories and a bottle of bourbon for company. Only Sarah Anderson can see straight through Nate's surly exterior to his pain. As childhood sweethearts they were inseparable--until he left, shattering her heart. But hanging out like they used to--racing horses and shooting the breeze on the ranch--they begin to see that there really might be that spark still between them....

The story says that one day a Fisher King will rise to heal the land. In the 1950s, they’re still waiting. . . . “A captivating historical thriller, a great spine-tingling romp through history in search of the Holy Grail. Fans of The Da Vinci Code will love this!”—Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland and Paradise Alley At the turn of the twentieth century, a baseball player named George Gibson embarks upon a mystical journey to the Congo. His mission: to shepherd a powerful relic to its home in Abyssinia. But poet-turned-grail seeker Arthur Rimbaud is after what Gibson possesses—as others before him have been for millennia. A half century later, after receiving an honorable discharge from the Korean War, twenty-year-old Lance Porter vows to put his civilian life back together—which means heading to commie-infested Berkeley to see his high school sweetheart, Ellie. But after Lance gets cold feet, he encounters instead a drunk, gay poet named Jack Spicer, who spews crazy stories about Lance being the Fisher King. It appears that the bearing of the grail has been bequeathed to young Lance, much to his shock and disbelief. Can a legacy born in the deserts of Ethiopia truly be reemerging in the bohemian bars of New York City and San Francisco? And is a vet with a lost soul really worthy of its care? Alexander C. Irvine has breathed a refreshing burst of air into the Arthurian legend. In One King, One Soldier, ancient characters and Irvine’s pitch-perfect historical accuracy merge with a gritty, dark portrait of America in the cold-war ’50s. Here, three stories come brilliantly together in an edgy mix of baseball, imperialism, poetry, and grail mythology.