52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Outdated, sloppy, and sensationalized, September 5, 2005
This review is from: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (Paperback)
I have never understood why Norman Cantor seems to think the public only wants the "movie version" of history instead of the real thing. But the movie version -- including outdated ideas, sensational assertions and gross misunderstandings -- is what this is. After reading this book -- which, fortunately, I didn't pay full price for -- I am happy to see from the reviews posted here that others have spotted its many flaws.
Quite a few people who come to this book WITHOUT much background in medieval history or medicine find it fascinating, and feel they have learned a lot about history from it -- though admittedly it's also rambling, repetitious, VERY poorly edited and sometimes difficult to keep track of. (I'll second all those criticisms but won't address them here.)
On the other hand, people who actually KNOW something about biology, anthropology, genetics, epidemiology, demographics or material culture will be brought up short by Cantor's sloppy thinking and downright inexcusable ignorance.
One reviewer comments, "Cantor's research for this tome must have been incredibly extensive, since he provides excruciating details for every topic..." But in fact, it's those very fascinating details that are often wrong. Just about any time I found myself saying "Wow, I never knew THAT," it turned out later that Cantor was wrong. For instance, he clearly didn't even bother to verify his facts on the old "Ring Around the Rosy" legend -- check it out on the Urban Legends Reference Pages; the song seems to hve come into existence in the 1880s.
As for demographics, he confuses the statistics on life expectancy badly, saying that a modern actuary would have given the 15-year-old Princess Joan "just about ten years to live", based on an *average* life expectancy of 25. This is highly misleading, because the highest death rates were among children under 5 -- if you made it to age 20 (only about two-thirds of the children born actually did), you could expect to live at least into your 50s, even under the appalling sanitary conditions of the time. And Joan was a princess. relatively well cared for and well nourished, and might have lived even longer. King Edward I lived to be 68; Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) lived to be 82.
He also asserts that men might be on their third or fourth marriage by age 45, ignoring the fact that women of that age might almost equally well be on their third or fourth husband. The tendency for women to die in childbirth is nearly balanced by men's tendency to die in wars, brawls, or hunting accidents.
His carelessness about material culture is at least as great. He perpetuates the myth of the Great Unwashed by asserting that people didn't "bathe" -- they may well not have immersed themselves completely in water, but at least the upper and middle classes washed their bodies regularly (a sponge bath and a good rinse), changed their underwear frequently, and swept their floors daily. He regularly gets clothes wrong: women did not wear "corsets" in the 1300s, and also a velvet altar frontal is not a "vestment," nor would it be used ON the altar. (Vestments are clothing, cloths ON the altar are always linen.)
The real problem, though, is that Cantor apparently hasn't figured out how to write competently for a lay audience. He seems to think the public only wants the "movie version" of history. I've read several of his other books, and his textbooks -- where he's not trying to be breezy or topical, or to air his sometimes crochety opinions of modern life -- are fine. His _Medieval Lives_, on the other hand, is terrible: it's at least as sloppy and filled with errors as this is. The worst parts are where he's trying to be funny.
I read William Manchester's _A World Lit Only by Fire_ perhaps seven or eight years ago, when I knew less than I do now, and found I think nine errors of fact in its first dozen pages. And I don't have a PhD, just a good liberal arts college degree. In a morbid way, it's amusing to hear THAT book praised as better than this one. Perhaps that IS an accurate assessment.
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100 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If you liked A DISTANT MIRROR you can SKIP this book., April 13, 2001
I have rarely read such a poorly edited book. The text is extremely repetitious. Points are strung across lengthy asides about people and their obscure lineages which make throughline often hard to follow. Large claims are constantly made about the impact of the plague that the text did not remotely back up.
In addition, there are frequent stray references to men being gay which are usually tangential to the argument, and even a section that verges perilously on blaming Jews for their own persecution which I found offensive despite 1) not being Jewish and 2) being extremely chary of the Political Correctness brigade.
The only really useful point is that anthrax was probably as important a factor as the bubonic one, but that point is made long before the halfway point. Beyond that, I learned nothing of value that was not in Barbara Tuchman's masterful A DISTANT MIRROR. With his imposing credentials, I am sure Cantor has done great work in the past, but this particular book is a major dud -- as much as I hate to say this about anything an author put work into, this book is, sadly, not worth the money.
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