John Kelly - The Great Mortality [2006][A]

Book Description
Release date: January 31, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0060006935 | ISBN-13: 978-0060006938 | Edition: Reprint
La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A book chronicling one of the worst human disasters in recorded history really has no business being entertaining. But John Kelly's The Great Mortality is a page-turner despite its grim subject matter and graphic detail. Credit Kelly's animated prose and uncanny ability to drop his reader smack in the middle of the 14th century, as a heretofore unknown menace stalks Eurasia from "from the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal [producing] suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing." Take Kelly's vivid description of London in the fall of 1348: "A nighttime walk across Medieval London would probably take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter.... Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road." Yikes, and that's before just about everything with a pulse starts dying and piling up in the streets, reducing the population of Europe by anywhere from a third to 60 percent in a few short years. In addition to taking readers on a walking tour through plague-ravaged Europe, Kelly heaps on the ancillary information and every last bit of it is captivating. We get a thorough breakdown of the three types of plagues that prey on humans; a detailed account of how the plague traveled from nation to nation (initially by boat via flea-infested rats); how floods (and the appalling hygiene of medieval people) made Europe so susceptible to the disease; how the plague triggered a new social hierarchy favoring women and the proletariat but also sparked vicious anti-Semitism; and especially, how the plague forever changed the way people viewed the church. Engrossing, accessible, and brimming with first-hand accounts drawn from the Middle Ages, The Great Mortality illuminates and inspires. History just doesn't get better than that. --Kim Hughes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The Black Death raced across Europe from the 1340s to the early 1350s, killing a third of the population. Drawing on recent research as well as firsthand accounts, veteran author Kelly (Three on the Edge, etc.) describes how infected rats, brought by Genoese trading ships returning from the East and docked in Sicily, carried fleas that spread the disease when they bit humans. Two types of plague seem to have predominated: bubonic plague, characterized by swollen lymph nodes and the bubo, a type of boil; and pneumonic plague, characterized by lung infection and spitting blood. Those stricken with plague died quickly. Survivors often attempted to flee, but the plague was so widespread that there was virtually no escape from infection. Kelly recounts the varied reactions to the plague. The citizens of Venice, for example, forged a civic response to the crisis, while Avignon fell apart. The author details the emergence of Flagellants, unruly gangs who believed the plague was a punishment from God and roamed the countryside flogging themselves as a penance. Rounding up and burning Jews, whom they blamed for the plague, the Flagellants also sparked widespread anti-Semitism. This is an excellent overview, accessible and engrossing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Later called the Black Death, the mid-fourteenth-century plague epidemic was known as the Great Mortality by its European survivors. It killed 60 percent in many places, even more in self-contained communities, such as monasteries--in all, one-third of Europe's people. Western Europe is the primary focus of Kelly's compact history, which is "intimate" in that it highlights many particular persons' passages through the crucible years, 1348-49. Some of those are famous (e.g., Petrarch, Boccaccio), others long-forgotten figures weighty in their time (e.g., Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury), a scandalous celebrity (Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, whose prosecution, ultimately before the pope, for murdering her husband, a son of the king of Hungary, prefigured O. J. Simpson's as a meretricious diversion), and commoners like John Ronewyck, the reeve, or manager, of a large English farm, whose character Kelly extrapolates from business records. Kelly proceeds chronologically, beginning with the plague's prehistory in north central Asia and its spread through China before empire-building Mongols brought it west. He notes the ripeness for disaster of the overpopulated, resource-depleted, ecologically stressed late-medieval Europe on which the plague descended, and in the most riveting chapter considers the outbursts of anti-Jewish violence by plague-panicked Gentiles, which the church tried, seldom successfully, to stem, and in which modern, racist anti-Semitism was forged. This sweeping, viscerally exciting book contributes to a literature of perpetual fascination: the chronicles of pestilence. For more, see the adjacent Read-alikes column. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reviews
“John Kelly gives the reader a ferocious, pictorial account of the horrific ravages of [The Black Death].” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

“Splendidly written. Kelly has written a popular history based on the best scholarship available, and written it very well indeed.” (Detroit Free Press (**** 4 out of 4 stars))

“A fascinating account of the plague. A frightening reminder of what could happen today.” (Nelson DeMille, The Birmingham News)

“Stunning. The Great Mortality [is endowed with] the sheer immediacy ancient history yields to only a few.” (Houston Chronicle)

“A compelling and bone-chilling account.” (Tampa Tribune)

“...splendidly written...” (Philadelphia Inquirer)

“This sweeping, viscerally exciting book contributes to a literature of perpetual fascination.” (Booklist (starred review))

“A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe…putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“...accessible and engrossing...” (Publishers Weekly)

“A compellingly vivid account.” (The Guardian)

“THE GREAT MORTALITY skillfully draws on eyewitness accounts to construct a journal of the plague years.” (New York Times Book Review)

“THE GREAT MORTALITY is a chilling account of a global siege, public pits, death-carts, silent villages and empty streets.” (Charleston Post & Courier)

“A compelling and eminently readable portrait.” (Library Journal)

“Powerful, rich, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose.” (Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and John James Audubon: The Making of an American)

“Written with a keen eye for the details of the past, it might also be a warning about our future.” (Jack Weatherford, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World)

“Rich and evocative…written in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman, I couldn’t stop reading this work of brilliance and wisdom.” (Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone)

About the Author
John Kelly, who holds a graduate degree in European history, is the author and coauthor of ten books on science, medicine, and human behavior, including Three on the Edge, which Publishers Weekly called the work of "an expert storyteller." He lives in New York City.