John Kelly
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By: Harper Perennial
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 66
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
Vivid, Brilliant, Alive 5 out of 5 stars.
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The most extraordinary thing about John Kelly's book, The Great Mortality; an Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Times is how a book centered about Death can be so alive and vital. The multitude of compulsively readable, brilliantly written vignettes draw us into the lives of the people and we mourn their loss as we mourn those of people we know...my heart clenched when I read the concluding sentence of Agnolo of Turin's diary for 1348: "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands" What makes it so hard to bear even after all these centuries, is some of his previous diary entries: "Some of the dead were...so ill covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city."
Vivid pictures fill all the senses and make even the cities and towns unforgettable. Swaggering Marseilles, "a medieval Big Easy" where the lower part of the town, inhabited by the whole panoply of lower class, middle-class, tradesmen and medieval town-dwellers, smelled like "a mermaid with loose bowels" contrasts vividly with the papal pomp and aristocratic artistic life of Petrarch's Avignon.
And here is Cheapside, London: "Imagine a shopping center where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon, and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road, and you have Cheapside, the busiest, bawdiest, loudest patch of humanity in medieval England."
Books on the plague tend to be boring/horrific accounts of death in great numbers or scientific treatises on Y pestis; Kelly's well-researched book contains both the numbers and the science, but it, alone, of all the books I have read, makes the time itself live
Editorial Review:
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.
