Synopses & Reviews
The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, takingmillion lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded in a haze of myths.
Now, Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.
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"[Cantor] sounds the depths of medieval history for truths that are always relevant to our times." Anne Rice
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"...impressionsitic and interesting...." The Washington Post
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"A most accessible, fascinating resource for high-school world history studies." Booklist
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"Historian Cantor pull[s] together existing scholarship on the subject and provide a wide-ranging overview." The New York Times Book of the Times
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"The best book on the Black Death...." Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Oxford, and author of Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years
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"[Cantor] makes a particularly compelling case." Publishers Weekly
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"Cantor illuminates intricate connections [that] allter the course of culture, religion, war, and peace in incalculable ways." Boston Globe
About the Author
Norman F. Cantor is Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at New York University. His academic honors include appointments as a Rhodes Scholar, Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow at Princeton University, and Fulbright Professor at Tel Aviv University. His previous books include Inventing the Middle Ages, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Civilization of the Middle Ages, the most widely read narrative of the Middle Ages in the English language. He lives in southern Florida.