The Great Mortality is a synthesis of more specialized scholarly texts using some of the latest creative non-fiction techniques to make it more accessible for the general reader. Due to the nature of the sources, the Black Death is actually a very difficult subject matter to turn into a readable narrative - as so many failed past attempts can attest - and this is probably the best there is at the moment. Kelly covers the main themes: outbreak and origins, biology, depopulation, social and economic effects, persecutions, religion. There are end-notes (no in-line footnote), but oddly no bibliography, or no Further Reading, such as a list of modern literature about the Black Death.

Kelly makes some large leaps towards the end about the consequences of the Black Death, namely, by de-populating Europe, the Black Death ushered in the Early Modern Era with an emphasis on labor saving devices. Although this conclusion seems like common sense, it is problematic on a number of fronts - not the least being the Black Death was only one of many reasons for a demographic decline in the Late Middle Ages. As well, scholarship is actually divided if the Black Death really had any major consequences at all - it is one of the great questions of history. For the most part things just continued on as they had - the Hundred Years War took a short break then picked right back where it left off, etc.. Kelley doesn't question or go into all the finer details of his conclusions. It's very easy, too easy in a popular history book, to reach sweeping conclusions about the books subject matter "changed the world" (so many books have sub-titles to that effect), the difficult part is to prove it and I'm not sure Kelly has fully represented the scholarship. He does do an excellent job of representing the most recent debate about what caused the Black Death (plague or some other disease).

Overall I found the book highly readable, but nothing particularly new and some of the conclusions are sweeping in what was a very complex period. I've read much about it already in survey texts and encyclopedia articles, but Kelly goes into enough detail, with quotes from primary sources, to make it more tangible. If you want a "one book" on the subject without needing specialized knowledge of the Middle Ages this is probably the best there is.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

An interesting synthesis of the research on the Black Death that swept through Europe and Asia in the 1300s and devastated the world economy and society. Ultimately Kelly's conclusions are not earth-shattering, but the book is an accessible, scholarly read. For those of you who enjoy books on the plague, or history, this is recommended. ( )

Good description of the plague's travel through the old world, All the gorey details. Explores ordinary lives. ( )

This is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. The author, John Kelly, has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He understands enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway), but it was clearly the history that excited him. More specifically, he seems to find the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague most compelling.

Kelly claims that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In so looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's done these people a service. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that they even got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.

But despite Kelly’s efforts, the sheer scale of the loss of life is emotionally numbing. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent each area of Europe, at some point, one starts to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city" so many times before it just starts to feel like “Yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that is the way that I began to experience it. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to create a certain distance.

I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague traveled and how the character of the reaction was different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, while some other places with similar mortality rates failed to manage burials at all.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.

At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.

Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague traveled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course, for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but it's apparently not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. So there is not much of the sort of information that more serious science or medicine buffs might be interested in.

But what do you expect when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?

I'm also not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading this book lives in) people understand that microbes cause diseases. I believe that this one piece of knowledge dramatically changes the way that we experience disease, even when it occurs on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I’d like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would, at least in part, in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).

That being said, what makes the human element of this story so fascinating is that the people alive during the great morality did not know anything about bacteria. How they reacted to the situation, when the idea of Yersina pestis was entirely foreign to them tells us something, perhaps something hopeful about human nature. I’m not sure that knowledge will inform us as we face the known and anticipated challenges of AIDS and avian flu, but it can give you hope for a time when we will again face a problem that we don’t yet understand.

The real story here is the fact that the society, in many places, continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that can give you a lot to hope for the rest of us on down the road.