I find it difficult to give this a rating not only because of what it is--a book that straddles the fiction/non-fiction line, written centuries ago--but also because of the reasons I read it. I wasn't looking for the story, but for insight into the time period, the science and the language and the people and the geography. It's part anecdote and part statistic, and it makes me wonder what it would have been like to be a contemporary reader of something like this, when it felt like an authentic representation of something that could conceivably happen again tomorrow and not a fictionalized account of something that we no longer fear...or if we do, not at all in the same way or context.
