The Great Mortality, (Paperback)

from Stbalbach

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 ...

from cmc

An extremely readable book that covers the story of "The Great Mortality", more commonly known these days as the "Black Death"-Europe's first major encounter with the plague. The plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which is epizootic in various rodent populations, including ma...

from Eurydice

Fascinating and exhaustively researched. Kelly handles the inherent controversy over death tolls, and the more recent arguments over the actual causes of the Black Death and its difference from most later outbreaks with an openness and even-handedness that never sacrifices his own opinion. As a n...

from RandyStafford

If you are interested in the Black Death and have never read a general history of it, Kelly is as good a place to start as any. It's as well-written and full of anecdote as Norman F. Cantor's shorter In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made and has not dated as much in its b...

from SilverDragon

When studying history it's easy to get bogged down in statistics and forget that this happened to real people. I appreciated that the author put the history into context. One realizes that not much has changed since the time of the Black Death (human nature, I mean). While the subject is depressi...