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

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.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
There is an immense literature about the Black Death, the catastrophic plague that swept through Europe in the middle of the 14th century, but the subject of death on a mass scale has acquired heightened urgency in recent years because of AIDS, genocide and the various threats posed by terrorism. For that reason John Kelly's The Great Mortality is timely and -- though the word may seem odd considering the context -- welcome. 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. This is, as Kelly's subtitle promises, an "intimate history" of the plague. Though the story is set in full historical context and though a full panoply of gruesome statistics is presented, its emphasis is on the ordinary (and some not so ordinary) men, women and children who fell victim to the plague, and those who survived. Thus, for example, there is his account, drawn largely from "a Franciscan friar named Michele da Piazza," of the plague's arrival in Sicily, in the city of Messina: "Soon Messina began to empty out. Friar Michele speaks of crazed dogs running wild on deserted streets, of nighttime fires winking from crowded fields and vineyards around the city, of dusty, sun-drenched roads filled with sweaty, fearful refugees, of sick stragglers wandering off to nearby woods and huts to die. He also describes several incidents of what sound, to a modern sensibility, like magical realism but were probably incidents of panic-induced hysteria. In one, 'a black dog with a naked sword in its paw' rushes into a church and smashes the silver vessels, lamps, and candlesticks on the altar. In another, a statue of the Blessed Virgin comes alive en route to Messina and, horrified by the city's sinfulness, refuses to enter. 'The earth gaped wide,' says Friar Michele, 'and the donkey upon which the statue of the Mother of God was being carried became as fixed and immovable as a rock.' " It is tempting to say that the horrors of the Black Death are beyond the comprehension of 21st-century readers, but in fact a contemporary comparison is all too painfully at hand: World War II, the effects of which were felt almost everywhere that humans lived and the human toll of which ran into the tens of millions. As Kelly puts it, "the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, swallowed Eurasia the way a snake swallows a rabbit -- whole, virtually in a single sitting. From China in the east to Greenland in the west, from Siberia in the north to India in the south, the plague blighted lives everywhere, including in the ancient societies of the Middle East: Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. How many people perished in the Black Death is unknown; for Europe, the most widely accepted mortality figure is 33 percent. In raw numbers that means that between 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains of Moscow, the continent lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants." It was a dreadful way to die. People's physiques were grossly distended, unbearable pain rushed through them, they screamed and wept as they died. Though previous and subsequent epidemics moved relatively slowly, this one marched from place to place with such speed that "several medieval medical authorities were convinced the disease was spread via glance." As one wrote: "Instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick." The considerably more mundane truth is that it was spread at first by rats -- in particular one known then as "Pharaoh's rat," now called the tarabagan -- and then by the breath and touch of the humans afflicted. The plague would have been devastating in any circumstances, but those of mid-14th-century Europe were especially hospitable to it. Early in the century, "a great many things began to go terribly wrong" on the continent. Among these were awful weather -- "earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, heavy rains and winds" -- that left crops "stunted and waterlogged" and brought uncountable thousands to the edge of starvation; pervasive waste and filth, rich breeding grounds for rats; endless and increasingly savage warfare, which made "the medieval battlefield and the medieval soldier more efficient agents of disease." Europe was a disaster waiting to happen. Waiting was exactly what Europe did. As the plague pressed its relentless advance, and as the news preceded it from place to place, people were paralyzed with dread: "Though the plague was moving with great swiftness, often advancing several miles in a single day, the sense of shock had evaporated. Most localities had several days' to several weeks' advance notice of its arrival. Enough time to think and wonder and worry." There was little that people could do. Medieval medicine "was a mixture of folk wisdom, magic, superstition and craft." Important changes were under way at the hands of "the Arab master physicians," who were transforming medicine into "a sophisticated intellectual discipline," but little of what they had learned was widely known and practiced. In trying to devise preventive schemes, authorities had few useful suggestions. It was agreed that "the best defense against plague was to remain healthy, and above all, this meant avoiding infected air," but it was hard to be healthy when food was so limited and nutritionally inadequate and when the air stank with the fumes of filth and human and animal waste. There simply was no choice: The plague had to run its course. In a few places such as England, where "steady leadership may have helped to sustain order, self-discipline, and lawfulness," the toll was brought somewhat under control. In Florence and Venice, rudimentary public-health systems were established "to oversee sanitation and the burial of the dead," which doubtless was of far greater benefit to future generations than to the victims of 1348. Indeed in many places there was evidence of the human capacity to overcome adversity: "The forceful Venetian response to the Black Death proves the point of Disaster and Recovery, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission study on thermonuclear war. In the worst years of the mortality, Europeans witnessed horrors comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even when death was everywhere and only a fool would dare to hope, the thin fabric of civilization held -- sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but it held. Enough notaries, municipal and church authorities, physicians, and merchants stepped forward to keep governments and courts and churches and financial houses running -- albeit at a much reduced level. The report is right about human resiliency: even in the most extreme and horrific of circumstances, people carry on." Beyond that, Europe emerged from the plague a better place than it had been before. As the distinguished plague scholar David Herlihy pointed out in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1997), the great reduction in population created opportunities for the survivors and those who came after them; there were fewer people, more jobs and a higher standard of living. As Kelly says, before the Black Death the continent "was caught in a Malthusian deadlock" in which "the balance between people and resources had become very tight." After the plague, "smaller population meant a larger share of resources for survivors -- and, often as well, a wiser use of resources." Not that it was any help to the tens of millions who died during the plague, but Europe "emerged from the charnel house of pestilence and epidemic cleansed and renewed -- like the sun after rain." The Great Mortality is an admirable work of popular history, a genre too often derided by scholars. Kelly summarizes and interprets previous scholarship in a wholly accessible way, and his research in primary sources gives the book its powerful human element. He has a mildly irritating tendency to repeat bits and pieces of information unnecessarily, but that is a minor complaint about a good book.Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

Philadelphia Inquirer
"...splendidly written..."

Publishers Weekly
"...accessible and engrossing..."

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

Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa
"There has never been a better researched, better written, or more engaging account of the epidemic. Superb and fascinating."

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

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

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

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

Book Description

In October 1347, at about the start of the month, twelve Genoese galleys put in to the port of Messina [Italy].

So begins, in almost fairy-tale fashion, a contemporary account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- what we call the Black Death, and what the generation who lived through it called la moria grandissima: "the great mortality." The medieval plague, however, was more than just a European catastrophe. From the bustling ports along the China Sea to the fishing villages of coastal Greenland, almost no area of Eurasia escaped the wrath of the medieval pestilence. And along with people died dogs, cats, chickens, sheep, cattle, and camels. For a brief moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, the words of Genesis 7:21 seemed about to be realized: "All flesh died that moved upon the earth."

The Great Mortality is John Kelly's compelling narrative account of the medieval plague, from its beginnings on the desolate, windswept steppes of Central Asia to its journey through the teeming cities of Europe. "This is the end of the world," wrote a bootblack of the pestilence's arrival in his native Siena. The Great Mortality paints a vivid picture of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349: bodies packed like "lasagna" in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through the streets early in the morning to pick up the dead, desperate crowds crouched over municipal latrines inhaling noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague, children abandoning infected parents -- and parents, infected children.

The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the cause of the plague and takes into account why some scientists and historians believe that the Black Death was an outbreak not of bubonic plague, but of another infectious illness -- perhaps anthrax or a disease like Ebola.

Interweaving a modern scientific methodical analysis with an evocative portrait of medieval medicine, superstition, and bigotry, The Great Mortality achieves an air of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy never before seen in literature on the plague. Drawing on the latest research, it unwraps the mystery that shrouds the disease and offers a new and fascinating look into the complex forces that went into the making of the Black Death.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Great Mortality is John Kelly's narrative account of the medieval plague, from its beginnings on the desolate, windswept steppes of Central Asia to its journey through the teeming cities of Europe." The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the cause of the plague and takes into account why some scientists and historians believe that the Black Death was an outbreak not of bubonic plague, but of another infectious illness - perhaps anthrax or a disease like Ebola. Interweaving a modern scientific methodical analysis with portrait of medieval medicine, superstition, and bigotry, The Great Mortality achieves an air of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy never before seen in literature on the plague.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post

The Great Mortality is an admirable work of popular history, a genre too often derided by scholars. Kelly summarizes and interprets previous scholarship in a wholly accessible way, and his research in primary sources gives the book its powerful human element.

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

This was Europe in the 1340's, the decade of the advent of the Black Death, and in his harrowing new book, The Great Mortality, John Kelly gives the reader a ferocious, pictorial account of the horrific ravages of that plague … this volume's chief interest lies in its overview and synthesis of more academic studies and Mr. Kelly's ability to turn his research into an emotionally accessible narrative, animated by wrenchingly vivid tableaus and alarming first-hand witness accounts - accounts that give the reader an intimate sense of day-to-day life in medieval Europe and the terrible ways in which the Black Death disrupted it.

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. Agent, Ellen Levine. (Feb. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews