Reviews

     I'd like to introduce you to a less commonly known form of a hazard, disease. To do this, I'm going to review a book by Philip Ziegler, called The Black Death.

The Black Death. By Philip Ziegler.
HarperCollins Publishing, 1969.
In The Black Death, Philip Ziegler offers a unique look into the art of exploring the past. While many often find history to be a tedious and boring subject, Ziegler shucks tradition in favor of explaining what happened in an enchanting, almost story-like manner. The way he tells it, is so passionate, so intriguing, that as a reader, you are drawn to him, eager to read what he has to say. His combination of highly detailed explanations with modern day comparisons made his work, which may have otherwise seemed incredibly long, a mostly easy read. In his book, The Black Death, which is about 280 pages, Ziegler covers the entirety of the plague. From its cradle to its grave(pun intended), he goes in-depth on everything from its origins, to its spread, the amount of devastation it caused, and finally how & when it ended. And if that wasn’t enough already, Ziegler also tackles important after the plague issue. Things like how many lives were lost, and what impact it had on the economy and society.

One of the most amazing things about his book is, of course, his amazing attention to detail. I’d imagine that’s almost the most important quality a historical book can have; second only to it being accurate.That’s just the thing though. You can tell, throughout the book, just how prevalent this research is in his writing. Nearly every single page has reference to either his main source, or a collection of local accounts that he commonly refers to as ‘chroniclers’ Also, when mentioning a new topic or bringing up new facts, he always makes sure to mention at least one, if not two or three, additional sources to back up his information. If that’s still not enough to convince you, you could always try the eleven page bibliography in the back of the book. The book is carefully laid out as well. One quick glance at the table of contents and you can see the clear progression from the origins and nature of the Black Death, to its spread from its birthplace, to Zeigler’s critical analysis of the impacts of the plague.

I learned so much from this book. And when I combine that with what I’ve learned in this class, I have a pretty solid knowledge base on the Black Death. One of the main things I was curious about was the origin of the pandemic. I learned that the Black Death was a bubonic and a pneumonic plague. Not only that, but there were three strains of it. The bubonic plague had two strains. The first, which only lasted the first few months of the outbreak, caused a fever and made the infected cough and spit up blood. This strain killed its victims in three days. The second, which occurred over the rest of the time, caused people to grow large, extremely painful tumors in various regions of their body. If the tumors drained on their own, the person would likely survive, but if not they would die within five days. The pneumonic plague was by far the deadliest due to two things. Firstly it causes its infected to cough blood into the air, creating even more victims and quickly. Secondly, the pneumonic plague killed in just under two days. The amount of people that died from the Black Plague in Europe was equal to approximately one third of its population of 4 million at the time.

It’s not really that surprising, considering what a wide scale hazard a plague can be. However, things could have gone a lot better had the people of the time at least tried to mitigate the hazard. In fact, it is likely their ignorance that got so many of them killed. Zeigler points out how, at the time, many Europeans would, though hearing of disasters to the far East, believe that the stories were true, but would not actually think it could happen to them. That’s why, when the plague turned its gaze on them, they were caught off guard. Instead of quarantining the few ports that plagued peoples originally arrived at, they closed them, forcing the plagued ships to go from port to port in an effort to seek aid. This was the initial reason for the spread of the plague.

For all that was good in this book, there were some flaws, some things that took away from the experience. While it is probably for the best that this book was not written as a narrative, there were some issues with the style. To use writers terminology, the entire book is basically a giant info-dump. Plus, a lot of the content can get repetitive since, while he much more in depth and in detail in nearly all of the middle chapters, he does originally cover the basics of everything in the first two chapters. Don’t get me wrong, I like details as much as the next guy, but here it feel a little bit like overkill.

But hey, if you’re a big history buff, you’re curious about learning about the Black Death, or you’re just interested in hazards other than the typical weather related kind, this is a great book to rent, if not to own. Some examples of the things you’d learn from reading The Black Death are: how it came to be called the Black Death, the medical knowledge of the time, and the effects of the plague on the Church and on man’s mind, to name a few. Philip Ziegler is clearly an accomplished historian as well as a truly masterful wordsmith and his book is a compelling and interesting read.