Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

THE MOSQUITO DETERMINED OUR HISTORY Review by Herman Silochan - Toronto Caribbean Independent Newspaper The Mosquito - A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, by Timothy Winegard In the past four decades, history has been forced to be dramatically rewritten, over and over, from ancient times to the here and now. The further opening up of archives in the great libraries, monasteries, museums and government records offices of the world is but one avenue for revision. Significantly though, subjecting specimens, species, animal and plant, even relics, to DNA classification and testing has forced re-interpretation on its head. Forensic anthropology and archeology have come into their own. Those of us who recall our high school history, and later at university, do have a good sense of the sequence of events. But what about the scenes behind the scenes, so to speak? All of us know that Alexander the Great invaded western India through the Indus Valley, and it was drummed i...

Noreen Taylor and Andrew Preston - photo George Socka   Andrew Preston is named top Canadian non-fiction writer - takes the Taylor Prize! The Winner of The 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction is Andrew Preston (Cambridge, England) for Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy , published by Knopf Canada . Preston teaches American history and international relations history at Cambridge University, where he is a fellow of Clare College . Before Cambridge, he taught history and international studies at Yale University. He has also taught at universities in Canada and Switzerland and has been a fellow at the Cold War Studies Program at the London School of Economics. He was born in Ontario and received his BA from the University of Toronto . Jury Citation: "Fluently written, comprehensively researched, and scrupulously balanced, Andrew Preston's Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith describes how the foreig...