Excellent - broad-ranging, thoughtful, and balanced. The author describes, as the subtitle indicates, both the plague itself and how it affected European society. The only reason I'm not giving it five stars is that I wish he had said more about the equally devastating impact of the plague in Asia and Africa; to me, "The World It Made" implies more than Western Europe.
For Western Europe, though, this would still be a great portrait of life in that time and place even if the plague had not occurred. It's colorful, often funny, and very human.
It's also fascinating to look at the probability, based on variations in the environment and symptoms, that "the plague" was actually more than one disease - the bubonic plague with which we're most familiar and also a lethally contagious form of anthrax that accounted for the very rapid deaths of many people and the fact that many who died lacked the symptoms of bubonic plague.
Barbara Tuchman also wrote about life in Europe in the 14th century in one of her best books, 1978's "A Distant Mirror", the title referring to the ways the 14th and 20th centuries were both times of great tragedy and upheaval. Given the ways that a number of deadly diseases are developing defenses against all modern medicine can throw at them, adapting to and overcoming our treatments faster than we can invent new vaccines and medications, we may see the events in this book echoed in the 21st century, too.

Very little on the ACTUAL plague. Rife with antisemitism, conspiracy theories and misogyny. Avoid.

I thought the book was okay enough for me to finish it (though it was a trudge), but maybe not advertised correctly. I was expecting a book that took a medical and historical anthropological approach to the Black Death, extrapolating the ripples it created to the modern day. Hopefully, like The Ghost Map. What this book is mostly about is medieval property and marriage law and the various aristocratic changes of power in Europe and France during medieval times (and also I guess how the Black Death sometimes disrupted them).

The narrative is not chronological, which quickly becomes confusing and repetitive, especially when a random aristocrat is introduced for the third time. The information isn’t completely uninteresting, but ultimately is hard to follow as a cohesive narrative instead of occasionally overlapping anecdotes (that once again, only vaguely relate to the Black Death). This leaves the points he’s trying to make muddled and woven around incredibly tangental asides, that would leave me wondering, “How does this relate to the Black Death again?”.

I will say that I was interested to see some clear parallels between post-Black Death Europe and post-COVID 19 United States. For example, large scale labor organizing/protest and labor shortages. Additionally, the concept of blaming political unfavorables for causing the pandemic and those in power using that traction for political gain.

As a microbiologist I also have to mention the “Star Dust” theory of disease spontaneous generation that’s proposed at one point. I think it’s worthwhile that the author mentioned this theory, as it’s interesting that it exists and is supported by well regarded astrophysicists. However, (and maybe it’s the 30 years of microbial hindsight speaking) it’s pretty crazy to me how little anyone mentioned seems to be familiar with basic tenets of microbial evolution and quite frankly natural selection. The same microbes that are found in deep sea vents can be found in our hot water heaters with no account as to how they got either places, did they fall off comets to get both places? Or is it a case of rapidly converging mutations leading to similar structures? I’m not saying I disagree with the star dust theory as something that could POTENTIALLY happen. It’s laughable to say that Bubonic Plague (something that can in fact be found in the environment) is caused explicitly by space dust coming off comets and that’s it’s not happened once, but many times throughout millennia. I wish the author would have described some microbiology based theories in addition to this more outlandish one.

Very interesting topic and research, but mediocre writing. Short enough that it's still worth it, though.

1.5 DNF

It took me more than a year, but tonight I finished this book. It's hard for me to review it because of my starts and stops. However, I can say that it started a lot stronger than it finished. The author, a pre-eminent middle ages historian, writes with a dryness befitting of his academic credentials. I had hoped this would be an engaging history of the black plague, however it read more like a personal indulgence of the knowledge of the author. Scattershot facts and unconnected anecdotes from the mid 14th century, without the singular focus on what caused the black death and how people dealt with it.

I found this book tucked into the back of a discount book store while traveling for work in Denver in the summer of 2019. I betrayed my own rule that life is too short to finish a book that's not keeping my attention. I guess I just kept hoping this would finally do something for me.

If you want an engaging history of the black death, I'd give this book a hard pass. I'm still looking for the "go-to" book on this topic. I'll keep hunting.

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Good quotes:

"You played the hand you were dealt, the life to which Christ had called you, and then it was over, frequently in childhood or adolescence, almost never after the age of fifty." -on the lifespan during the middle ages

"The nobility lived these short lives without a sense of irony. Funeral sermons delivered over the coffins by by mumbling bishops might indeed expatiate on the shortness and fragility of human life. But the nobility did not act that way, preferring the more visceral contact of the hunting dogs and hawks they loved than the anxiety-ridden, memory-dominated self-consciousness of affluent and well-educated people today."

"A consensus can be wrong." -about the causes of the black death

Bizarrely incoherent.

It is seldom that I have come across such a poorly edited book. In the Wake of the Plague reads more like a collection of notes that have been shuffled and placed at random than a historical treatise. Poorly structured paragraphs, endless repetition, irrelevant anecdotes and derivative generalizations are rampant throughout. The author’s blatant condescension for women and anti-Semitic comments only further epitomize this prejudiced and poorly executed effort.

I don't read a lot of books about history. Is this how they're supposed to read? I found it convoluted, disjointed, and prone to tangents. I would spend pages wondering what in the hell this was supposed to do with the main topic of the chapter, and then finally, at the end, he would tack on an epilogue explaining how it all fit together. In the end, I guess I did learn a lot about medieval history, but not all that much about the Black Death itself. I think it would have been more interesting to read a book about the actual plague, and not about how it shaped history afterwards.