Parasites have a bad image, and not without good reason: they nest in their host without being asked, feed on it and, in the worst case, destroy it. Cruel, yet fascinating. In their book “Parasites”, the doctor Hans-Peter Hutter and the medical journalist Raoul Mazhar dedicate themselves to the perfidious strategies that parasites use and teach us some of the horrors of nature.
In eight short chapters they introduce various parasites: from malaria pathogens to pinworms to the pair fluke or liver fluke, they show us which strategies are used by parasites that predominantly infect humans, which intermediate hosts they use and how they manipulate them and the final hosts. Although or precisely because this is not necessarily appetizing in many places, they convey their content with a good pinch of humor, which doesn’t always spark, but still wraps the topic up more charmingly than a Christmas present.
This is informative and educational. Only in the penultimate chapter do the two authors deviate from their usual structure: it looks like a collage of excerpts that they had up their sleeve for further chapters, but still wanted to accommodate in a condensed form. At this point the depth that they show in the other chapters is missing. However, this is a bad downer in an otherwise entertaining book.
Review: Hans Siglbauer
Hans-Peter Hutter, Raoul Mazhar
Parasites – masters of manipulation
Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 192 pages, € 25,–
ISBN 978-3-8000-7896-7