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.