Bird Flu, Pfft. Now This Is a Plague
Written: Feb 03 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well researched. Interestingly written.
Cons: Plays a little fast and loose with the line between fact and theory.
The Bottom Line: If you just what to know what the big deal about the black plague was, this is your book.
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| Darkmistress's Full Review: |
I happened to notice The Great Mortality when it first hit the new hardcover table just as I was finishing off The Great Influenza and setting off on a thing about the 1918 influenza epidemic. I read a number of books about influenza before I got a little bored with the topic and went looking for The Great Mortality, prepared for it to be a reiteration of all the other books I’ve read about the black plague.
It was and it wasn’t.
Kelly cites other authors constantly. Rarely do you get through five pages without three mentions of other scholars. And if you’ve read up on the subject previously, you will see the handprints of other scholars on every page. He leans quite heavily on Philip Ziegler and Norman Cantor. Now Ziegler wrote the seminal work on the plague and pretty much everybody quotes him. Trying to get around him would be like trying to talk about Morse Code without mentioning Morse. However, the Cantor references really surprised me because the main thrust behind Cantor’s book was that the plague wasn’t really caused by Y. Pestis (the plague bacillius) but was instead a form of sheep murrain and Kelly dismisses that idea as completely stupid (without actually using the word stupid.) If you don’t agree with the guy, why do you cite him so much? Very odd.
However, other than that oddity, this is an excellent work and an excellent starting place for reading up on the plague. (And isn’t that what everyone wants to do?) Kelly lays everything out in chronological order starting with the supposed origin of the plague on the Russian Steppes. Sadly, he presents this theory as fact and truth, not as theory. We don’t know for sure that Y. Pestis came from Russian marmots. Heck, we can’t be entirely certain where SARS came from and that just happened. Add to that the fact that you’re dealing with Medieval chroniclers penchant for exaggeration and poetic license and you have a problem. Kelly is very clear about the poetic license part at least. At one point there are 4 different dates for the arrival of the plague and Kelly lists them all with an explanation for which is more likely. If only he had been so scholarly about the various theories about what disease the Black Plague really was.
Now, as for being a gripping read, oh boy. Cinematic. This book is surprisingly cinematic. There were times when I wondered if Kelly was hoping to sell this to Hollywood. He goes off on fanciful flights, describing what the main "characters" might have been wearing and seeing as they walked through town both before and after the arrival of the plague. Of course this means it’s probably a bad idea to read this while eating. I came across a couple of particularly juicy passages over lunch occasionally and needed to either set aside the book or the lunch (or both) for a few moments. Just to give some context to that statement, I used to eat lunch regularly with two friends, one who is married to an infectious diseases doctor and one who has a friend who was a parasitologist in Egypt before returning to the States to work in an LA emergency room. For fun, we would discuss really disgusting things to gross out eavesdroppers. I really don’t get put off my food easily, but this is very vivid.
So, The Great Mortality is a good read, dense and not quick, but entertaining throughout. It’s also a very well organized making it terrifically easy to follow from plague pit to plague pit. It also supplies more context than most plague books. Quite often plague books start when the plague does. Kelly starts a bit before, giving you a bit of an idea of the character of each devastated place before it’s been devastated. This adds to the emotional impact of the disease. He also extends a bit into the future to illuminate the effects the plague had on society as a whole (though Cantor’s book is better for that in my opinion.) On the downside, the scholarship is a little on the shaky side. He’s absolutely firm about things that are debatable and that’s no good. I would consider him a writer more than a scholar and would hesitate to recommend this as the be all and end all of plague research in 2005. However, if you’re looking for some solid infotainment on the Black Plague then you have one stop shopping right here.
Recommended:
Yes
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Darkmistress
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