This book was written before Covid, a plus as far as I am concerned as it avoids the inevitable need to make forced after-the-fact parallels between the Black Death and the last few years. It recounts the progression of the Black Death though Europe from the perspective of various cities, giving the reader a sense of the dismally unsanitary world in which the disease spread, the calamitous losses, and how communities dealt with it. Some degree of repetition emerges from this pattern as most cities had similar experiences and dealt with the disease in similar ways. Of course, a few parallels to Covid do emerge and are all-the-more noteworthy precisely because they are not forced and after-the-fact. Those parallels include inflation, labor shortages, zealotry, conspiracy theories, and humanity’s apparently limited ability to act rationally when under duress. ( )

The author addresses the plight of each Europe as a whole, instead of only one country. The reader begins with a chapter on how the disease attacks the body, the three types and how it is spread. Then a timeline of how he disease crossed Europe, examining each country in turn. The author also covers the political drama, horrific Jewish persecutions, the Flagellant movement and natural disasters (earthquakes, flooding) that occurred simultaneously with the Black Death. It is still debated today as to why the Black Death devastated the human population to such an immeasurable extent in the 14th c, and why at that particular time. Kelly seems to be in favor of Nature's far-reaching and corrective hand. The human population was booming and the opportunistic rodent populations essentially bred themselves into a "Malthusian pruning mechanism." I'm not sure I'm in agreement, but the author provides an excellent argument.

Food for thought:
"Technological innovation that included the horse collar, the carruca plow, the watermill and the windmill increased agricultural productivity, thus a population boom and protective, isolating forests came down."
"In the later Middle Ages death...was seen as the moment at which the individual...took stock of the meaning of life...The plague pit was the antithesis of this idea: it made death anonymous, casual, and left the individual unrecognizable."
"Many people seem to have died not because they had a particularly virulent case of the plague, but because the individuals who normally cared for them were either dead or ill...The farmers who grew the food and those who carted it into the city were also being decimated by plague."

There are parts that could've been trimmed, but overall an easy read and an excellent starter for anyone learning about the Black Plague. ( )

This is a fascinating and in-depth look of the Black Plague that swept through Constantinople, Asia Minor, North Africa, and all of Europe in the 14th Century. It seemed fitting to read it now in 2021, in part to remind myself that we've been here before, and to understand more of what went on way back then.

Kelly does a phenomenal job with explaining where the Plague came from, which rodent on the plains of Mongolia carried the flea, and how there were really two kinds of Plague: pneumonic and Bubonic. I had no idea. He also uses contemporary sources as a way to point out that what was "every living soul" in medieval writing was, in truth, closer to 30 percent or 40 percent and why. Because there were different death rates in different areas.

And how the plague spread from Mongolia through trade routes (think: bags, packs, pack animals, minimal hygiene) to Caffa on the Black Sea, and then from there to Constantinople. Again, the hyperbole of "everyone on board the ship was dead when it was in port" gets a modern historical review.

The amount of death and destruction, though, is immense. Town by town and city by city he leads us, up water routes and across land routes, and writings by those who survived and those who didn't. Also part of the history are the economic and ecological disasters that happened in different parts of Europe; England was especially hard hit with torrential rains that resulted in widespread famine 20 years before the Plague, with resulting lowered immune systems of the children who survived the famine only to die so quickly of the Plague.

What kept me from giving this book the full 5 stars was the author's commentary and interjections of "he must have thought" and occasional pulling together of threads that too jumbled to make a great deal of sense. ( )

La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, 25 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.

Fun! ( )

In the midst of our pandemic, I decided to read about the granddaddy of all pandemics -- the Black Death of the Middle Ages, that wiped out somewhere around half the population of many areas it touched.

As I listened, I found my brain making strange connections between then and now. For instance, conspiracy theories flourished. People behaved in counterproductive ways. There were other things that struck me, but my retention of details isn't as good as it used to be. It was an interesting book. I could have been happy with few less details about rats and fleas . . . He spent a lot of time putting things in context, sometimes with details that caused me to lose the train of thought. It was important that he pointed out the persecution of the Jewish people during the plague (conspiracy theory was that they caused the plague!) but a history of anti-Semitism from the time of the Gospel accounts through Nazi Germany seemed a bit out of place -- that could be a book in and of itself. ( )

Ornate Non-Fiction

"The Great Mortality" is not a terrible book, but the prose is terribly ornate. Behind flowery language and silly metaphors, there are good facts about the plague. The author, John Kelly, and editors certainly could have trimmed a lot of poetic fat.

The bulk of the book focuses on individual cities, such as Genoa, Lyon, and Marseilles. The author tries to trace the plague chronologically from city to city, finding good, firsthand accounts from priests, lawyers, and writers - usually one from each city. There are no footnotes, but the end notes sometimes indicate that Kelly's flowery language is prone to exaggeration.

Kelly offers some, but not much, record of the first pogroms against what he calls "Jewry," an outdated term in 2005. However, he offers an excellent and convincing synopsis on the history of Antisemitism in the early Christian church. Although it was out of place in this book, I found it very informative and insightful.

I preferred two other books about the plague: "In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made" by Norman Cantor. "In the Wake of the Plague" seemed more dense, perhaps because it left out all the superfluous language that Kelly included. ( )

Interesting. Nicely written. ( )

Despite some very silly writing and though, or perhaps because, it wears its knowledge so lightly as to make it seem diaphanous this is a wonderfully readable book.

From its beginning a couple of its qualities bothered me, and one of them did till the end. In his introduction, Kelly says that it was original source material that inspired him. In the footnotes-cum-bibliography to which I often turned there wasn't much evidence of his having drawn from primary sources, though: most of the books he cites are secondary sources like survey books on the plague. Sure, within the text he provides contemporary quotes and statistics but the source of them is usually one of those books--for heaven's sake even the footnote for a verse from Piers the Plowman refers to one of them and not directly to the poem itself.. Some of the cited titles are at least anthologies of writings of the period; on the other hand some citations are from the likes of BBC History Magazine and a Victorian historian. Early on, then, I discarded the image of a scholarly old don sleepless from the search for neglected source material and the effort of mastering languages as they were used centuries ago.

Kelly is mad keen on speculation, as well. By that I don't mean that what he says is necessarily unfounded on fact and unreliable; it's simply that he lets his imagination run away with him. (Fair dos though, hedoesn't try to mislead the reader by presenting his fantasies, his might-have-been storytelling, as fact) A memorable example is his mention of the grave & graveside inscription for--possible--plague victims followed by a long account of poor imaginary Kutluk and Magnu in their final hours. Even the contents of the former's delirious and imaginary hallucinations are detailed. The inscription itself isn't.;

Now and then the book turns suddenly & very markedly less rndearing: I'm not at all sure that he quotes someone praising global warming and someone else declaring that nuclear war wouldn't necessarily be *that* big a deal ironically. Nor is there any sign that Kelly's anything less than earnest when he says that because an ambitious young man married a woman with a bit of money, the couple's many moves to ever-dearer houses might well have been the result of her relentless nagging.

But for some reason this is terrifically readable, and if you take it as a history book by a good writer who's read up on the subject and organises his material beautifully but who sometimes can't help himself presenting non-fiction as a fiction writer would, you will probably enjoy it hugely.

This is the most accessible of the plague histories I’ve been reading recently. The book jacket describes author John Kelly as a “storyteller”, and that’s pretty accurate; Kelley intersperses his narrative with vignettes, like describing feelings of a couple who die together in their peasant hut and the anguish of a shoemaker who has to bury his wife and five children with his own hands to keep them out of a plague pit. While this makes the book very readable, Kelly is not particularly careful to distinguish between events that can be documented from contemporary records and scenes he’s making up for narrative effect. He covers a greater time period then the actual plague years, fitting the plague into the larger context by discussing the destruction of the Templars, the Avignon Papacy, and the Hundred Years War. In this way, The Great Mortality is reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, which also covers the 14th century.

Kelly also owes a lot to Ole Benedictow’s The Black Death, including copying Benedictow’s slightly annoying habit of referring to the plague as a conscious entity. Kelly is also very much on Benedictow’s side in believing that the plague was caused by Yersina pestis, and devotes a whole chapter to a pro-and-con discussion of various alternate theories - pulmonary anthrax, an Ebola-type hemorrhagic fever, and an unknown “Disease X”. He does not, however, agree with Benedictow’s belief that plague mortality approached 75%, sticking with the more traditional 25-30%.


No maps or other illustrations, but a pretty good bibliography. Not a bad choice for an introduction to the plague years and the 1300s in general. ( )

I thought the first 1/3 of this book was a 4/5 star review of what exactly happened in 1348 throughout Europe that ended up killing 30-50% of the populous. The last 1/3 was also 4/5 start review of how all this death changed the people, changed their religious views, lead to the persecution of Jews, and is similar to the lost generation after WWI. The second 1/3, however, is closer to 3/5 stars, and was for the most part boring anecdotes throughout the villages the Plague effected in chronological order of its attack. I think in theory this does sound really interesting...but for whatever reason, John Kelly did not convince me that I should care.
Anyways, really good book if you can get past that middle section. ( )

Having read a couple of historical fiction novels with the Black Death aka the Great Mortality as the book’s backdrop, I picked this book up to read to understand this apocalyptic-like event. Between the years of 1346 and 1353, the Black Death creeped across Eurasia, initially along major trade routes and later inland, killing one-third of the area’s population.

I had to slog through the initial chapters that described the plague cause, Yersinia pestis and its vector, the rat flea, which were carried on rodents such as rats and marmots. However, after this introduction, the author communicated the impact of the pandemic, chapter by chapter as the plague spreads east to west and south to north.

Lacking knowledge of today’s epidemiological studies, a panicked mankind behaved in irrational behaviors including the extermination of groups of people thought to be the cause of the disease, including Jews, lepers and gypsies. Others, believing this calamity to be the act of a vengeful God, hoped to atone for their sins through self-flagellation with whips that might have included metal hooks on the ends.

When the plague burned itself out, its departure triggered major historical changes, including the Renaissance. Clergy, being one the hardest hit group, resulted in citizens believing that the ordained were not needed as a go-between with God sowing the seeds of the Reformation a couple of centuries later. Additionally, the depopulation of the workforce spurred technological advances in the invention of labor-saving devices. One invention included the Gutenberg printing press.

I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the impact of the Black Death and its ramification on public health, society, religion, and technological innovation. This event and its subsequent plague years were true history makers. ( )

Everything you wanted to know about an outbreak of the black plague. ( )

A comprehensive discussion of the Black Plague and the ensuing plagues that followed. Very interesting, albeit horrifying - not just the deaths but the lawlessness that occurred in the wake of so much suffering. ( )

Devastating! ( )

Great subject; chaotic presentation. He really likes the word "malodorous." ( )

An extremely readable look at the Black Death (called the Great Mortality at the time) as it spread across Europe from historical, geographical and medical viewpoints. There are plenty of telling quotes from contemporary sources and when these are not available, Kelly uses quotes from subsequent appearances of the plague in the same location. This is not original research however, it is a composite of the work of others.
The introduction to emergence of the plague in the 1340's and the probable different types (bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic) is extremely useful to someone, like myself, who was not previously aware of the medical analysis.
The background to the historical period is good, but did sometimes feel as if Kelly were adding the background as he had researched it and found it interesting, rather than it being particularly relevant to the story he was telling.
There were two factors that detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. Firstly, at times, particularly near the beginning, it felt as you were jumping back and forth in time and space as the background was being developed. This part could have done with tighter editing. Secondly, Kelly enjoys the use of metaphor to describe the movement of the plague, which makes for a readable book, but I felt overdid this, especially when he anthropomorphises the plague; it just jarred.
But these are minor criticisms of the style and the author must be congratulated for making such a tragic tale, so interesting whilst maintaining your consciousness that this was a catastrophe for those involved.
I end with the heart breaking quote that Kelly considers most haunting in all the literature of the Black Death, perhaps because it is as he say plain spoken "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands." ( )

A well written and very entertaining chronicle of the Black Death's visit in the mid-1300s. Maybe a little more detailed than I would have liked. Opened my eyes to the sweeping positive effect such an event can have on the planet. Along with killing some 25 million people, The Plague opened the doors for huge leaps forward in industrial modernization (like the printing press), radically changed the political and economic landscape, and transformed social and gender roles. Medicine had been inching slowly toward science, and away from astrology, and the Plague helped spur vast changes to the entire medical community - doctors, hospitals, and medical education. Maybe it's just me, but I rarely find so detailed an historical take as this. Hard to put it down. ( )

5172. The Great Mortality An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly (read 14 Jun 2014) Though on 18 April 1970 I read Philip Ziegler's book on the Black Death I thought I would read this book to see if it told the story better. The Black Death was brought to Europe on a ship which had been in the Crimea and in 1347 came to Europe and spread the plague, which raged through nearly every place in Europe till about 1351. There are a lot of horrendous accounts of the deaths and the evil things people did to those they suspected of having something to do with the plague--but apparently the rats, who had much to do with it, were not suspected particularly. Some localities saw half or even more of the population die. Europe was outrunning its resources so in a way the plague made Europe more livable for those fortunate enough to survive. The accounts of the mistreatment of Jews show where Hitler maybe learned some of his evil ways. I was pleased to see that the Pope did condemn such mistreatment. Also of interest was the account of the Flagellants who mistreated themselves in mass marches in 1348 and 1349--and people stood and watched! It was a fearsome time and this book does a fair job on the subject. ( )

Well. You certainly can't claim that John Kelly wasn't thorough.

At first I really did find the book interesting and the writing engaging. But after about a hundred pages, it just got really old. Kelly's writing is certainly pretty and elaborate, but after a while it gets really hard to keep track of whatever he's talking about. Sentences get really wordy.

For my purposes, the book was -too- thorough. I only wanted to know about the Black Death, honestly. I'm not a big history buff, so the centuries worth of flashbacks and backstories were unnecessary, in my opinion. Kelly also referenced more modern happenings, which might have seemed like a clever idea at the time, but only served to confuse me as I tried to make the connection.

Maybe I'm just not enough of a historian to appreciate a masterpiece, so I'm sorry. The Great Mortality is HIGHLY informative, covering all bases of every tiny village affected by the plague along with the history and future of every tiny village. Add in some Jewish history and the arguments of the plague deniers (who, despite the misleading name, don't believe that the plague was a giant conspiracy), and you've got a very detailed book about ... a lot of things. ( )

I’d give it a 3-½. It seems the author wanted make an accessible, reader friendly book about the Black Death and mostly succeeded. There’s a good amount of information and I really got a sense of the time and places.

Like others here, I was put off by some of the writing. For the most part he writes well and it’s a good read, but it seems like he was trying too hard to put some poetry in it. He personifies the virus constantly (the virus stopped outside of London and shot a game of pool and had a couple beers before heading into town) and throws awkward overwrought descriptive passages in whenever he can.

He does attempt to tell personal stories that I assume are pieced together from records, and they’re mostly interesting, though it seems like he must be filling in a lot of blanks. He also goes into the ways the plague affected politics, society, and the economy of Europe. For me that was one of the most interesting parts of the book. There’s not a lot about the rest of the world, but that is partly due to lack of records.

The whole thing could have been a little shorter. It seems like there’s a fair amount of repetition, and toward the middle it gets a little slow when he gives the play by play of how the plague entered what seems like every town in England. With some better editing this would be a much better book, but it’s still worth reading for a good overview of a turning point in history that’s not too bogged down in academics. ( )

This may well be the funniest book I've ever read about the Black Death. Kelly's a good writer with a wry sense of humor. I also enjoyed the way he personified the plague- it's something I've always done in my head, too. I can just see Yersinia pestis striding through the countryside, scythe in hand.

I've read a lot of plague books, so much of the information was familiar to me- but there's a lot of fascinating first-hand reporting from various sources, much of it new to me. The last chapter, about the revisionist theories regarding the actual identity of the plague-causing organism, was entirely riveting.

Recommended, if you like this sort of thing. ( )

Kelly lays out a very detailed, sometimes too detailed, history of the plague. While I found parts of the book very redundant, there were interesting stories mixed throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed reading about the correlation between the plague and weather trends, war, and diets. Even after reading the book, it is hard to comprehend how people dealt with not only the physical demand of disposing of thousands of bodies, but also the emotional trauma of losing so many family members. I wanted to like this book more, but became too sidetracked by all the rambling stories that often left we wondering how they related to the chapter. ( )

Kelly takes us on a tour of Europe during the Black Death of 1348-49, during which death rates from the disease ranged from 20% in areas that "got off easy" to 70% in areas that were hit particularly hard. Most of the book's chapters examine the plague on a city by city basis. We see how people here reacted differently than people there. The only weakness in the book is that after a few chapters, it gets a bit repetitious. Though there are interesting differences in the way the death played out in London vs. Paris, there is enough similarity (naturally) to get a little tedious. ( )

A well written account of the devastation of this plague that ravaged most of the world. And what a horrible time it must have been to have lived through it much less died from it. Kelly seems to have researched the subject well and intersperses it with historical connections of the time. Of particular note is the continued persecution of the Jews as scapegoats for this also. I can't help to think hundreds of years from now readers, if they read, will be shaking their heads about our time of horror dealing with cancer. ( )