Volume 23, Number 15 · September 30, 1976
Epidemic Man
By Keith Thomas
Plagues and Peoples
by William H. McNeill
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 369 pp., $10.00
Most professional historians resemble small peasants, intensively cultivating tiny tracts of the past; their labor is arduous and indispensable, but if they pause to raise their heads their vision is usually bounded by their neighbor's fence. Some, bolder spirits, are like air travelers; as they peer down from thirty thousand feet, larger outlines of the past become visible; whole countries and centuries can be discerned, though sometimes the detail is rather blurred. Only a tiny few, powered by their own exceptional energy or the assistance of research foundations, project themselves above the earth altogether; for them the whole globe swims into focus and millennia of human history take shape before their eyes.
Review, 2879 words
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