Though his book's case studies, examining the plague's impact on particular individuals and families, are often compelling, the overall volume is flawed by the author's gross generalizations, reductive reasoning and efforts to force-feed the reader with his own dubious opinions. Cantor tries to pull together existing scholarship on the subject and provide a wide-ranging overview. In his new book, ''In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made,'' the historian Norman F. It sent shock waves through every aspect of civilization, rattling the social, economic and political status quo while ushering in new attitudes in religion, philosophy and the arts that would form a prelude to the galvanic changes of the Renaissance. The Black Death was the 14th century's equivalent of nuclear war: between 13 it wiped out a third of Europe's population, taking some 20 million lives.
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