Plagues And Peoples

4 Pages 964 Words

Plagues and Peoples
By: William H. McNeill

A critic is defined as a person who forms and expresses judgments and finds faults. As an average college student I do not even feel like I have the say to find faults and express judgments about William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples. This book is simply on a level that I have not managed to achieve comprehensively, in other words, I just do not possess the knowledge on this subject to feel that I have the right to make any judgmental comments on this critically acclaimed book. I do understand the ideas William McNeill explains in Plagues and Peoples, but I only understand them in a very broad, general way. To explain this book in one sentence from my point of view would be to say that disease had an extraordinary impact on humanity throughout history.
The publisher comments on this book saying “Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. The history of disease is the history of humankind.” The history of disease is the history of humankind. This powerful comment from the publisher ultimately represents the impact of this book. I may not be able to represent my feelings towards this book as well as the publisher did, but I do understand the importance of McNeill’s ideas about how disease effected humankind and I am simply amazed in how it effected history the way that it did. I find it ironic that this book is so original in the way it discusses the effects of disease on the history of humanity, because after McNeill points all this out to us in this book it seems so obvious, and I feel like this should have already been thought about in the development of humankind. Now, thanks to this book, these ideas are not only considered, they are very respected, recognized, and t...