The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

PRAISE FOR
The Great Mortality

EDITORS ’ RECOMMENDATION , SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“John Kelly’s Great Mortality is timely and welcome. . . . It conveys in excruciating but necessary detail a powerful sense of just how terribly Europe suffered.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post 


“The images could have come from one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish paintings of hell: dusty roads with frightened refugees . . . dogs and rats running wild on deserted streets; fields littered with dead bodies. . . . John Kelly gives the reader a ferocious, pictorial account of the horrific ravages of [the] plague.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“There is a seething vitality here. . . . [The book] leaves an optimistic impression of the human race as a kind of hardy bacteria—at once tiny and fragile but also determined to thrive and very, very hard to erase.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Splendidly written.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“While Kelly combines distinguished scholarship in science, medicine, and European history, other capabilities earn Mortality a place in plague literature with seventeenth and eighteenth century eyewitness accounts, respectively, in Samuel Pepys’s diary and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Kelly meets the need for verisimilitude faced by all serious historians by confronting some of the world’s darkest days as if he were a forensic sleuth who must re-create the ambience of the victims’ world before tracking down their deaths.” —Houston Chronicle

“A compellingly vivid account. Kelly’s prose moves with brushfire speed—often as exciting as a first-class TV drama-documentary.” —Guardian (London)

“Kelly is a reliable guide, with a gift for providing racy and vivid background for those who know nothing of the Middle Ages.” —Independent on Sunday (London)

“Kelly, the author of numerous nonfiction works . . . skillfully draws imaginative word pictures, for instance . . . Dorset is full of ‘brooding Heathcliff vistas.’ The selling of Papal indulgences turns the medieval church into a ‘spiritual Pez dispenser.’” —JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

“Kelly’s narrative offers us an intimate exploration of a world falling apart. It’s a world that, sadly, feels a lot like our own in its fears of an impending apocalypse from mysterious forces.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“John Kelly’s Great Mortality is one of those works that proves history can be a wonderful read and not merely a dry recounting of events and dates.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“The Great Mortality makes the pestilence personal, from the royals to the rowdies.” —Associated Press

“The Great Mortality skillfully draws on eyewitness accounts to construct a journal of the plague years.” —New York Times Book Review

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

“The Black Death is history’s best-known pandemic, but until now its full history has not been written. In The Great Mortality, John Kelly gives a human face to the fourteenth-century disaster that claimed seventy-five million lives—a third of the world’s population.” —Oakland Tribune

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

“Compelling. Explores both the human and scientific dimensions of the tragedy with skill and aplomb.” —Dallas Morning News

“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 . . .