Review: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very readable history of the plague, with caveats. The author includes many personal stories from around Europe. The book is divided mostly by country, with descriptions of the advance of the disease over time in each area, along with details of many cities and individuals. This doesn’t read like an academic book. The disease becomes a character, invading new territory, lying in wait in others. Unexpected, but I thought this choice helped the long text. The author does have a problem with the word “however”, however. On audio, the narrator plays along with the word when it first is used, over emphasizing it with pauses before and after. But the narrator, like the listener, soon gets tired of the use of this word, so by the end of the book, the narrator is quickly saying it. It is used here most times unnecessarily, where an “and” would have made more sense. I’d guess “however” appears, unnecessarily, more than 100 times in this book, mostly in the second half. I also noticed some text seemed duplicated within a few paragraphs of where it is introduced. I’m not sure how that happened, but listening to this produced a case of déjà vu. I did learn a lot listening to this book, but perhaps a bit more editing would have made it even better.

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