Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing theory about the influence of plagues on history
Review: Men and infectious organisms have long had an uneasy relationship: diseases like smallpox, the plague, measles and in more recent years influenza have carried off huge percentages of the population when they met a new population with no immunity. After 5 to 6 generations the grown-up population had developed enough immunity to turn the dreaded disease into a childhood affliction.William McNeill reasons in this book that for full-blown plagues to occur one needs large groups of people, such as cities and he theorizes about the influence that micro-organisms and plagues may have had on such diverse historical events as the development of civilization in China, the downfall of the Roman empire, the origin of the Renaissance, the conquest of the Americas and the industrial revolution. Even though definite proof is often lacking, the reasoning at most times is quite convincing even though it may be somewhat simplified here and there. The original version of this book dates from 1976 but is still very valid for our days. It is a shame that in the 1998 preface the author does not mention that diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, which are in the original text described as disease that have been fought successfully, are very much on the rise again and nowadays form the part of the "big three" of most lethal infectious diseases together with HIV/AIDS.
Rating: 
Summary: Mankind - the Parasite and the Host
Review: Plagues and Peoples is an informative and very readable summary of the relationship between mankind and disease. The author consistently views disease as a parasite and describes the history of plagues in terms of a parasite interacting with a host population. The parasite and the host interact and, over time, reach an equilibrium within the population that allows the both the parasite and the host to survive.
The most interesting feature of the book is his portrayal of mankind not only as a host, but also as a parasite himself. He uses the term macroparasite to describe human institutions and phenomena that also drain energy and resources from producers. For example, very high taxes or rents, Medieval labor laws and practices, war, and forced migration all drain communities and nations as surely as disease. He provides excellent, while still brief, commentary on the interaction between microparasites and macroparasites and the resultant depopulation of certain areas during certain periods. One might argue that this is not a newly observed correlation, but it has certainly never been explained as clearly and succintly as it is done here.
McNeill covers a range of topics. There is, of course, discussion of the plague and mankinds response to it. There us also commentary on leprosy. Why for example, was leprosy, so common in Western Europe and the Middle East in biblical times, to dissapear in the Middle Ages. ( The answer is not what you think. ) Did syphillis originate in the Americas ? If so it may have been the Aztecs' revenge on the conquistadors. Why are there childhood diseases ?
McNeill's arguements are somtimes intuitive and are, in some cases, based on limited data, especially when he examines the history of disease in Asia and India. However, he is careful to couch his observations in limited terms and clearly points out the limitations of the data. I found this to be a refreshing break from, for example, Guns, Germs and Steel, where the author used very limited data to draw absolute conclusions.
The new introduction ( the book was first publised in 1986 )has an alternate viewpoint on AIDS. He argues that, at the moment, AIDS as an epidemic does not rank among the great killers of mankind such as the plague. He draws some interesting parallels between the current AIDS epidemic and the historical spread of syphillis. I am not sure if I agree with his position, but it was interesting to hear something other than the usual end of the world scenario that often comes out of discussions of AIDS.
Rating:
Summary: Ashley Bricker TVHS
Review: Plagues and Peoples Review A disease has a pattern and a intent to destroy living organisms. All throughout time, populations have been destroyed by these microscopic organisms. Such tiny invisible living disease's have caused much uproar throughout our world. Organisms and disease are constantly changing even from before Homo sapiens, and all the way through today and tomorrow's time. William H. McNeill the author of Plagues and Peoples, will give you an inside look on all these topics. He explains in great detail how world history has been expanded, changed, and even destroyed by disease pools and human mistakes in understanding organisms beyond this world. There have been many books written on past disease, and what they have done to our world. Perhaps this book gives you that extra information on disease, how it spreads, and what destruction it causes in each country of our world. Believe it or not without these microscopic organisms that cause such massive die-offs and harm to or world, we would not be were we are today. Back in the time when humans first evolved and were learning how to survive, human disease would ruin populations in massive numbers. Medicines and cures were not available until later and more domestic times. Disease was hardly recognizable back then due to the weak and confusing records that were sometimes very rarely kept. In this book you will find knew ways of interpreting the world, and you will realize all the amazing and unimaginable living organisms out there shaping or world today. Plagues and Peoples even shows you how trade, animals, and even the smallest flee can have a great impact on who and what will survive in the future. Trade routes opened a wonderful opportunity for confined diseases in a certain area to travel to a knew country and possibly become epidemic. Trade was a way for many people in early times to survive with what they could. Without trade they wouldn't have gotten the materialistic objects needed for survival. When explores went out to find knew trade routes they were opening up a highway of infection. Rats aboard trade ships carried infected flees, and insects that spread disease like a wild fire. Most commonly found among rats were black plague. William H. McNeill really does an awesome job of putting you into the book to experience the thoughts and feelings of people in the time of black plague. He uses amazing description and evidence to introduce important facts in ways you can never forget. Who would of known something so simple like a mosquito could cause the world to end as we know it. The author really does a great job at supporting his topics he talks about. I can tell he did a lot of research and knew a lot about certain topics in order to go about and write an amazing book like Plagues and Peoples. He used many different sources and other professors and historians like himself in the process of writing this wonderful book. He includes a very long and serious acknowledgment thanking all those in participating in the writing of his books. He really does have a great amount of information all throughout Plagues and Peoples from beginning to end. He fully explains his topics, and tells the reader where he got his evidence and sources to all the information included in Plagues and Peoples at the end of the book. Throughout the book I did come across a few charts and maps to further help me, the reader get a full picture of what was going on in the book. When I got to part of the book that was a little above my level or I wasn't quite sure what the author was talking about, there was usually either a chart or a map I could look at to clear up any misunderstandings. It was a very easy book to read, because located in the back of the book was a list of important notes from every chapter. Every confusing word I had any problems with understanding were all defined in writing also located in the back of the book. For example, I came across a part in the book were I was having trouble understanding the differences between small pox and measles both childhood disease's. All I had to do was go to page two-hundred and eighty one in my book, and the answer was right there. It was a very helpful key to have these notes already taken for me, so I could read at my own pace and still pick up any confusing parts. I could really tell William H. McNeill was very interested in everything he wrote. I could feel his enthusiasm and need for everyone who read this book to enjoy it as much as he did. He has an amazing sense of writing, he knows what he was doing, and he never got off a subject to the point where you could lose focus. I am usually the type of person who has to read short chapters so I can understand every point in the book. Plagues and Peoples is a two-hundred and fifty page book, with only six chapters. The writing was so great that I never lost interest, and I was even able to divide chapters in half and I never missed a point. I would really like to applaud his amazing writing skills, he was blessed with the amazing gift to write books and he uses that gift to fulfill his and everyone else's dreams on knowing about the world in-front of them. I give a lot of credit to the author in the writing of this amazing book full of world history. I was never board nor angered at anytime while I was reading this book. The writing was so good, and so well done that anyone who reads this will be moved in the same way I was. You will have a whole new respect for our world.
Rating:
Summary: TVHS Student review
Review: Plagues and Peoples Review: A disease has a pattern and a intent to destroy living organisms. All throughout time, populations have been destroyed by these microscopic organisms. Such tiny invisible living disease's have caused much uproar throughout our world. Organisms and disease are constantly changing even from before Homo sapiens and all the way through today and tomorrow's time. William H. McNeill the author of Plagues and Peoples, will give you an inside look on all these topics. He explains in great detail how world history has been expanded, changed, and even destroyed by disease pools and human mistakes in understanding organisms beyond this world. There have been many books written on past disease, and what they have done to our world. Perhaps this book gives you that extra information on disease, how it spreads, and what destruction it causes in each country of our world. Believe it or not without these microscopic organisms that cause such massive die-offs and harm to or world, we would not be were we are today. Back in the time where humans first evolved and were learning how to survive, human disease would ruin populations in massive numbers. Medicines and cures were not available until later and more domestic times. Disease was hardly recognizable back then due to the weak and confusing records that were sometimes very rarely kept. In this book you will find knew ways of interpreting the world, and you will realize all the amazing and unimaginable living organisms out there shaping or world today. Plagues and Peoples even shows you how trade, animals, and even the smallest flee can have a great impact on who and what will survive in the future. Trade routes opened a wonderful opportunity for confined diseases in a certain area to travel to a knew country, and possibly become epidemic. Trade was a way for many people in early times to survive with what they could. Without trade they wouldn't have gotten the materialistic objects needed for survival. When explores went out to find knew trade routes they were opening up a highway of infection. Rats aboard trade ships carried infected flees, and insects that spread disease like a wild fire. Most commonly found among rats were black plague. William H. McNeill really does an awesome job of putting you into the book to experience the thoughts and feelings of people in the time of black plague. He uses amazing description and evidence to introduce important facts in a ways you'll never forget. Who would of known something so simple like a misquito could cause the world to end as we know it. The author really does a great job at supporting his topics he talks about. I can tell he did a lot of research and knew a lot about certain topics in order to go about and write an amazing book like Plagues and Peoples. He used many different sources and other professors and historians like himself in the process of writing this wonderful book. He includes a very long and serious acknowledgment thanking all those in participating in the writing of his books. He really does have a great amount of information all throughout Plagues and Peoples from beginning to end. He fully explains his topics, and tells the reader where he got his evidence and sources to all the information included in Plagues and Peoples at the end of the book. Throughout the book I did come across a few charts and maps to further help me, the reader get a full picture of what was going on in the book. When I got to part of the book that was a little above my level or I wasn't quite sure what the author was talking about, there was usually either a chart or a map I could look at to clear up any misunderstandings. It was a very easy book to read, because located in the back of the book was a list of important notes from every chapter. Every confusing word I had any problems with understanding were all defined in writing also located in the back of the book. For Example I came across a part in the book were I was having trouble understanding the differences between small pox and measles both childhood disease's. All I had to do was go to page 281 in my book, and the answer was right there. It was a very helpful key to have these notes already taken for me, so I could read at my own pace and still pick up any confusing parts. I could really tell William H. McNeill was very interested in everything he wrote. I could feel his enthusiasm and need for everyone who read this book to enjoy it as much as he did. He has an amazing sense of writing, he knows what he was doing, and he never got off a subject to the point where you could lose focus. I am usually the type of person who has to read short chapters so I can understand every point in the book. Plagues and Peoples is a two-hundred and fifty page book, with only six chapters. The writing was so great that I never lost interest, and I was even able to divide chapters in half and I never missed a point. I would really like to applaud his amazing writing skills, he was blessed with the amazing gift to write books and he uses that gift to fulfill his and everyone else's dreams on knowing about the world in-front of them. I give a lot of credit to the author in the writing of this amazing book full of world history. I was never board nor angered at anytime while I was reading this book. The writing was so good, and so well done that anyone who reads this will be moved in the same way I was. You will have a whole new respect for our world.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative, but highly difficult to comprehend
Review: Plagues and Peoples was a required reading book for my Sophmore AP History class. I found it to be extremly hard to read from the first few pages. I had no interest in it at all and found myself skiming it towards the end. Although I didn't find it a good read, it was very imformative and gave alot of interesting facts about the world and the diseases that occupy it. I only recommend this book to people who like ones of this nature and can easily comprehend such works. I don't however recommend it for High School students in grades lower than the 11th.
Rating:
Summary: Marvelous
Review: Quite a read. While some of McNeill's more sweeping conclusions are, I think, premature, this work will definitely make you think. Beautifully written, as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Great facts-boring outline
Review: The book Plagues and Peoples has been intended for people to recognize and be aware of how human beings or "homo sapiens" evolved. Starting from being apelike creatures living in trees to being a very complex society. It gives you the details on how every organism helped and developed how history and the very being of man came out to be. All of this facts are greatly interesting and gives you knowledge in the theme of the book but it lacks the spark that a book must have to keep the reader- reading. You really have to be in an isolated place free from distraction, and that is any to fully understand the message being transported to you. Furthermore the outline of it seems very formal which adds to it's being boring. As I said before this book had great facts but also a boring outline!
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating idea regarding historical cause-and-effect
Review: This book and William Wayne Ferris' Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan 645-900 both came highly recommended by my Asian history professor in college, and both offer fascinating "alternative" insights into why civilizations developed the way they did. It allows "ancient" history to become much more human when we allow ourselves to consider factors such as disease, hunger, and basic greed as motivating factors driving civilizations toward their destiny.
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Summary: disease as historical dialectic
Review: This book by historian McNeill seeks to, in his own words, " discern major landmarks in the interaction of human populations and microparasites". The book began as an inquiry into the role of smallpox in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and was expanded to similar parallels in world history. McNeill uses historical epidemiology as the organizing framework for his analysis of civilizations, as affected by changes in patterns of pestilential infection. In doing so, he extends the paradigms of disease and parasitism to the broader "macroparasitism" in social and cultural mechanisms. For example: "Religious history offers another striking parallel between Rome and China... Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In the forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places." (Chapter III p.121) For me, much of the delight of the book lies in the speculative leaps and connections that only polymaths of McNeill's stature are capable of making. The depth and breadth of learning that goes into the synthesis of such an ambitious survey is revealed in illuminating detail. McNeill is equally frank in acknowledging the limitations of his analysis, but makes the point that the body of scholarship has not been sensitive to the significance of changes in disease patterns throughout history. In that sense, the aim of this book is to "correct such oversight and bring the role of infectious disease in shaping human history into a juster perspective than others have allowed ..." In this he succeeds marvelously, I think. Advances in analyses of genomic history (at the human and microorganism level) should bear fruit in the testing of many of McNeill's hypotheses regarding mutual adaptation and equilibrium states in human history. And now, when looking to the roots of civilizations' ascendancies, I look past claims of "cultural superiority" to the paths of disease vectors ...
Rating:
Summary: Why Some People Won't like this Book
Review: This book will not appeal to those people that have a hard time accepting that man is a biological accident and only slightly removed from the rest of the animal kingdom. Those that deny evolution as a fact will positively detest it. The book illustrates how man's enviroment and it's resident diseases has controlled his migration and societal successes and failures.
I won't rehash the contents, the previous reviewers have done a good job of it. The book is interesting and thought provoking. So if you are closed minded and of a creationist mindset, reset your browser to the science fiction and fantasy book category.
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