Closing their hearts to pity, islanders herded hundreds of Muslim men, women, and children. 'As calamity followed calamity,' he writes, 'alarmed Cypriots began to fear that their Arab slaves. What Kelly calls the plague's 'third strain (of four)' followed the flood by days. The fate of Cyprus ('a fertile and blooming island converted into a vast desert') is instructive because it reveals the twin terrors of water and disease unleashed in tandem. They tell not of the Indian Ocean tsunami that engulfed Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand but of a 14th-century earthquake-driven flooding of another island, this one in the eastern Mediterranean.

The words are drawn from a stunning new book, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by veteran science writer John Kelly. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people-one third of the known population-before it vanished.Surely those words will strike many as an untypically lyrical rendering of December's seismic horror that killed some 283,000 and propelled 'tsunami' (Japanese for 'sea wave') into global collective consciousness.īut no. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. But statistics can't convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died how farm output and trade declined. The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers.

The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history-even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern. 'Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.' - Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The great mortality by john kelly