
The Black Death
A Personal History
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Narrated by:
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Geoffrey Centlivre
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By:
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John Hatcher
About this listen
By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived - and died - during the Black Death (A.D. 1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the listener directly into those tumultuous years and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have experienced and thought about the momentous events - and how they tried to make sense of it all.
©2009 John Hatcher (P)2009 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The core of the story - the plague's effect on the lives of everyday people - is as true as can be surmised, nearly 700 years later." ( Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Pretty Dry for Something Called a Personal History
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one feels the strugles of the survivers as well as the overall social and political changes that followed the plague.
an iteresting and informative account
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Any additional comments?
As a whole, after finishing this book, I found myself understanding the Black Death from the ordinary people's point of view better, the fears and hysteria before, the trials during, and the fall out afterwards. There is a lot of humanity in this book. Unfortunately, the author is very obviously a historian first, and a storyteller a distant second.Getting to the point often took longer then it should have. There's a lot of good information in this book, but you'll often have to sit through trivial fact reading and, often times quite literally, church sermons. Many of the points put forward are repeated several times, and some of it seems like the author is trying to work some medieval court records in. The introduction itself is almost an hour long snoozefest, and there's author notes before every chapter that often contain spoilers on what's going to happen in this chapter.
All in all, it's informative, makes you feel for the poor people who were so terrified in the face of something they couldn't understand or prevent, but it could've easily skipped or condensed a lot of the boring bits.
Obviously written by a Historian
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Descent book
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The narrator mumbles a lot of the time. I listen while working in the kitchen and/or house and to understand him, I've had to increase the volume well beyond what is comfortable.
I bought the book without listening to the sample. That was a mistake.
The content of the book appears so far to be great.
The worst narration ever
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Informative on many levels!
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Where does The Black Death rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
middleWas this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
noAny additional comments?
to much time spent at the beginning explaining to his academic friends that he was not writing a historical novel when he actually was. Way too much time.good story
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interesting and thought provoking
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Beautiful narration for history geeks
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A great way to enter into this period
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