[.ca] In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World ... (ISBN 0684857359)

From Amazon.com:
One-third of Western Europe's population died between 1348 and 1350, victims of the Black Death. Noted medievalist Norman Cantor tells the story of the pandemic and its widespread effects in In the Wake of the Plague. After giving an overview, Cantor describes various theories about the medical crisis, from contemporary fears of a Jewish conspiracy to poison the water (and the resulting atrocities against European Jews) to a growing belief among modern historians that both bubonic plague and anthrax caused the spiraling death rates. Cantor also details ways in which the Black Death changed history, at both the personal level (family lines dying out) and the political (the Plantagenet kings may well have been able to hold onto France had their resources not been so diminished). Cantor veers from topic to topic, from dynastic worries to the Dance of Death, and from peasants' rights to Perpendicular Gothic. This makes for amusing reading, though those seeking an orderly narrative may be frustrated. He also seems overly concerned with rumors of homosexual behavior, and his attempt to link the savage method of Edward II's murder to a cooling in global weather is a bit farfetched. Cantor wears his considerable scholarship lightly, but includes a very useful critical biography for further reading. While not an entry-level text on the Black Death, In the Wake of the Plague will interest readers looking for a broader interpretation of its consequences. --Sunny Delaney

a waste of time and misleading, read Tuchman instead:
As a European history teacher, I hoped that I would get some tidbits from this for my class and for my own edification. I found neither. I have trouble imagining that this writer is actually a Medieval scholar. I suspect he is suffering from Alzheimers. He has the reverence for facts of Ronald Reagan, among other dopey innacuracies: the end of the Roman empire is put two centuries late, the Romans he says had been fending off the Arabs for millennia (even though the Roman empire existed for less than one millennia), the plague came from Africa-it clearly came from East Asia. Further the writing style is terrible. It is nearly unreadable. There is constant repetition, bizarre and awkward phrases "biomedical disaster" and no structure. Each chapter wanders around without a thesis, repeats earlier chapters and makes pathetic attempts to tie in to recent events. There are also a huge number of ridiculous theories (plague was from outer space, without the plague the scientific revolution would have come centuries earlier, etc.) which Cantor badly explains and then doesn't critically evaluate. They might be true, he muses, without looking at any facts. I suspect that this was cobbled together from hastily written lecture notes for an introductory history class for brain dead undergraduates without the editing that it desperately needs. Don't waste your time on this, there is almost nothing to learn here. Instead read Barbara Tuchman's long, but fully researched and wonderfully detailed book: A Distant Mirror about the 14th century. It has a very powerful chapter on the plague and gives a real sense of Medieval life.

Mixed Feelings about this Book:
Norman Cantor's "In the Wake of the Plague" is rather an interesting read yet my feelings on this were mixed. With only ten chapters and roughly 220 pages, this book can be a useful work for the study of the Black Death due to its use of secondary researches and bibliography. However, it seems to be a bit unreadable and rather a subjective written. While I was intrigued with his use of secondary sources and his discussion in "Knowing About the Black Death" section, I was rather put off or confused by his writing style throughout this book, and I was not quite sure what conclusion(s) he was relating to the readers. While the author made some interesting points throughout the book, I was getting the impression that he wrote this book in a hurry.

Medieval-like writing:
Dr. Cantor is a medievalist, and writes in the style of his subjects: very rambling, with a tendency to ramify tediously so he can talk at length about what he finds interesting, whether or not it is relevant. Some good information, some mistakes even a non-scholar reader like me could spot. Not a lot about the plague. Some peculiar theories. What seems to me a misapplication of 20th-century terminology to 14th-century groups (for instance, what sounds like raiders or harriers, he calls terrorists).

Give me Snoopy any day:
It was a dark and stormy night in the groves of Academe as Norman F. Cantor wrote, sipping a glass of claret (clear wine from Gascony), although not of the same vintage as that with which Edward III gorged himself as he was sending off his daughter Griselda to marry the syphilitic king of Castille, who was trying to understand why, all of a sudden, Granada was in the southwest corner of the Iberian peninsula.....Oh help!

Easy read, if somewhat jumbled:
I bought this book at the airport in Boston and found it appropriate as an "airport book." On a late night flight, it was entertaining but not intense. Nor was it well organized. The end of the book abruptly stops with comments about Chaucer rather than a summing up of the main thesis. One gets the impression of an erudite academician, late in life, with lots to say but very little energy to say it in an organized way. Some of the errors are obvious, even to someone with only surface knowledge of the period. For example, he states somewhere in the book that Constantinople fell in the 14th century rather than in 1453. But for all that .. it is a quick read and can be considered as something like a "bathroom reader" -- full of interesting tid bits but without much of a unifying thread. His earlier books were much better organized. Maybe he just needs to take a vacation. I'd recommend it as a airplane or beach book (aka "history lite").