Kelly's book examines one of the greatest tragedies in recorded human history: the epidemic that wiped out at least one-third of Europe's population in just a few years in the mid-14th century. He also looks at newer theories about the cause and nature of the disease, which some scientists speculate may not have been the bubonic plague after all.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Booklist Ray Olson
This sweeping, viscerally exciting book contributes to a literature of perpetual fascination: the chronicles of pestilence. [15 Feb 2005, p.1047]
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Favorable
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Library Journal Tina Neville
A compelling and eminently readable portrait of daily life during the Black Death. [15 Feb 2005, p.151]
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
An excellent overview, accessible and engrossing. [17 Jan 2005, p.47]
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Richard Hauer Costa
Only occasionally does this master storyteller's fancy go over the top. He endows most of The Great Mortality with the sheer immediacy ancient history yields to only a few.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Chuck Leddy
John Kelly combines the skills of a medical writer with those of a historian in order to tell a morbid story.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Susan Jacoby
Even in a world saturated with more information than ever before about mass disasters (both natural and man-made), the 14th century outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague -- now known as the Black Death -- retains a unique hold on the popular imagination. [1 Jan 2006, p.R2]
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Favorable
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The Independent Bill Saunders
Kelly is a fair-minded and reliable guide, with a gift for providing racy and vivid background for those who know nothing of the Middle Ages.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Written for the lay reader rather than the scholar, it conveys in excruciating but necessary detail a powerful sense of just how terribly Europe suffered, and just how resilient it was in the face of what seemed to many certain extinction.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
When it comes to analyzing reactions to the Black Death, Mr. Kelly tends to come up with conclusions that are predictable, reductive or obvious -- or all three.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Mark Lewis
Kelly maintains a breezy tone, the better to keep his readers from bogging down amid the book's litany of horrors. He is occasionally repetitious -- he's too fond of a phrase he borrows, ''Malthusian deadlock'' -- and sometimes his prose grows overripe, as when ''the enormous sky oppresses with an infiniteness that crushes the soul.''
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Mixed
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The New Yorker Joan Acocella
There is, however, something wrong with Kelly's narrative plan, which, in much of the book, is to go region by region, city by city. For some municipalities, there is little information; for others, the facts are the same as elsewhere. So Kelly is forced to pad. Sometimes he fictionalizes.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Andrew Rissik
n his introduction, Kelly writes: "The medieval plague was one of the seminal events of the last millennium. It cast a deep shadow across the centuries and remains part of the collective memory of the West." True: and that's why its crater-like impact can't definitively be traced without a more inclusive degree of distance, a drawing-back from ground-level journalistic immediacy, at which Kelly is superb, into a broader cultural and deeper historical sense, which he doesn't really attempt.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shills to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. [1 Jan 2005, p.36]
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