As one customer reviewer on Amazon.com, Ricky Hunter, put it, this book is "an interesting hodgepodge of ideas, facts, theories, arguments, humor, and anything else" connected in some way to the plague. Cantor's account ranges from a solid section on what the pestilence meant for land-inheritance patterns when a third of the gentry suddenly died, to a bizarre passage suggesting that medieval Jewry's turn from Maimonides to Kabbalah may have helped pave the way for the pogroms that erupted as the plague struck European cities. Yet this imaginative notion pales compared to "Serpents and Cosmic Dust," a chapter that brings up the loony theory proposed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe that human disease came from outer space, and applies it to the problem of why the Black Death spared Bohemia.

In the Wake of the Plague is a wild ride, with unexpected insights and bits of information popping up every few pages. Part of the time, readers are safely in the hands of one of the great stylists of historiography, the author of Inventing the Middle Ages, The Sacred Chain, and other works both scholarly and accessible.

One of the set pieces of In the Wake of the Plague is the story of Princess Joan, the 15-year-old daughter of Edward III of England. In 1348 she sailed to Bordeaux, a stop on her way to marry Pedro, Prince of Castile. Cantor uses this episode to explain how England continued to control vast parts of France for centuries, how Bordeaux wine, as claret, slaked English thirst, and how dynastic marriages worked. His grasp of events in every corner of Europe at the time enables him to provide the background seamlessly. But why, in the middle of the story of Bordeaux's vineyards and the wine trade, did he throw in the fact that Baron James de Rothschild, of the Jewish banking family, would buy an estate in the late 1800s, and that Chateau Lafite Rothschild today costs $300 per bottle at auction? The reader is derailed. As for Princess Joan, she died of the plague a few days after arriving in Bordeaux, and the Plantagenets never were linked to the Crown of Castile and Aragon.

The strengths of In the Wake of the Plague go beyond Cantor's brilliant writing. He deftly explains such things as the role of the church in medieval English agriculture, why dowagers often inherited large estates as male landowners died during the Black Death, and why thousands of Western European Jews emigrated to Poland in the century following the plague-inspired pogroms in the West.

Some of his ideas are provocative: medieval gentlewomen may have been treated "as property" by their husbands and male relatives, he admits, but given the considerable esteem these men had for property, that is no small thing. And he reminds readers that the Jews who moved to populate Poland and the Ukraine created a world - lasting from 1480 to 1640 - of unrivaled prosperity and cultural richness there, an Eastern European goldene medinah (a Yiddish phrase meaning "golden state" or country). Viewing Jewish history through the prisms of the Holocaust and subsequent birth of Israel, he warns, can blind people to this long era of good fortune.

Unfortunately, the author's scattershot approach means that too much is left out of this book. Although he is obviously current on medical research related to Yersinia pestis, he offers no systematic treatment of the disease, its origins, biology, or spread. He does present the recently introduced theory, argued by Graham Twigg in The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal, that the Black Death may have been both bubonic plague and anthrax, since many victims died without showing any of the gross characteristics of the plague. But, more significantly, he does not give readers the basic information they need to evaluate that theory.

This outbreak of the plague apparently began in Asia and arrived in Europe in 1346 or 1347. It spread, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, to cover most of Western Europe before waning in 1350. But which countries suffered the most, and what were the losses in each? Readers will discover that Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal depicts the sense of doom inspired by plague's devastation of Sweden - but there is not another word about its effects on Scandinavia. Just a few pages and a map or two could have provided the mortality estimates for each region and a basic timeline.

Fortunately, readers drawn in by Cantor's bright writing and speculative approach will find an excellent bibliography at the end. This provides not just general studies of the plague, books on the literary, social, and religious angles, but also an overview of recent works on epidemiology. These include a reference to Flu, by one "Gina Kolotka." Misspelling (repeatedly) the name of the best-known science writer for the New York Times is not the only shameful typo in this book: the species name of the plague organism is misspelled on first mention, too.