I seem to get the flu at the most inconvenient times. Once was during a special legislative session, that I needed to cover…I was allowed to cover from home, but being able to stay awake and focused enough to give the work product to the client that we needed to produce was a tall order. I took LOTS of Day-Quil. The second was after I got The Call to be on Jeopardy! I was planning to use the approximately three weeks notice I was given to buckle down and study areas that frequently pop up on the show where my knowledge base was lacking. Instead, I got a particularly nasty bout of the flu that took me out of commission for much besides converting oxygen into carbon dioxide for a week. None of those subjects showed up in a significant way, so it didn’t end up making a different anyways.
It’s easy to forget how deadly the flu can actually be. But its death rate has nothing on the big kahuna of epidemics: the plague. Originating in wild rodents native to the steppes, the impact of the disease was primarily local for hundreds of years. But with the development of the Silk Road, the fleas who served as carriers of the virus had a busier, more straightforward route into the population capitals of Europe than ever before. John Kelly’s The Great Mortality tracks the outbreak known as the Black Death as it wound its deadly path around the continent, taking about one third of the population along with it.
Kelly has clearly done his homework, describing the varieties of plague (bubonic and pneumonic being the primary types he believes to have been involved in this epidemic), the trends that lead to Europe being especially vulnerable to disease, and tracing its trajectory from its likely genesis in the Black Sea region, entering Europe through shipping based in Italy. There was no way, really, to stop or contain it as it marched first through the city-states and then into the continent more broadly, even out to England and up to Scandinavia. It gave fresh vigor to anti-Semitic sentiment, with Jews blamed for it and subjected to pograms. It gave rise to new religious movements, like the flagellants. And it left Europe missing about 1 in every 3 people. An astonishing number!
In some ways, this book succeeds: it manages to convey a lot of information but remain readable. There’s a certain monotony just built into any narrative about the Black Death, because the story is fundamentally the same everywhere: the plague gets to a new city, everyone panics, lots of people die, it moves onto the next place, and then it happens all over again. Kelly attempts to counteract this by livening up his book with occasional humor and pop culture references, which ultimately work against it. It comes off cheesy. What’s worse is the editorializing he indulges in with his footnotes. In one, he notes two sources which differ on their estimates of the mortality rate of the plague in England. Without citing any additional supporting evidence, he asserts that one “has it about right” over the other. His willingness to throw his weight behind an opinion he apparently just likes better and endorse it as fact really undermines any authoritative weight he might have been able to establish. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a lot of good here, and I absolutely feel better-informed about its subject than I was before I read it. But both of those things drag the book down into being only okay, when it could have been solidly good. It’s not a waste of your time, but I can’t recommend it either.
