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The Fever Trail: In search of the cure for malaria by Mark Honigsbaum, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, ISBN 0374154694

IN the American Civil War, malaria caused 1.3 million casualties and killed 10,000 people on the Union side alone. Several battles were effectively cancelled because both sides were too sick to fight. Today it is the third biggest killer in the world, felling up to 3 million people a year. That’s twice as many as AIDS—and it could get much worse.

In this engagingly written and thoroughly well-researched book, Mark Honigsbaum unravels the history of the search for a…

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