The Third Horseman

While it has good intentions, and an admirable scope, ultimately this books overwhelming lack of focus is its downfall. It's about the famine after the Medieval Warm Period, but it gets so sidetracked by related issues (that it utterly fails to entirely relate to the book's main subject, ie, the famine) that it ends up a jumbled mess. A beautifully written and exhaustively written jumbled mess, but the fact remains that this book would have been better off as a series of essays concerning a period of Medieval history. Then, the expectation would have been just that, because that is, essentially, what the book is. Instead, readers pick it up expecting an account of Medieval famine and instead get several chapters on Scottish succession crises.

In short, I was expecting something akin to The Great Mortality by John Kelly, and instead got something far more similar to The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton.