JOHN KELLY

                                                                          Author of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the

                                                                              Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“THE BLACK DEATH:

THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER

IN HUMAN HISTORY”

Thursday, September 22, 2005

7:00pm  Goodrich Chapel

“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

Black Death.  The Great Mortality is the epic, extraordinary

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.

"Ferocious, pictorial...animated by wrenchingly vivid tableaus

and alarming first-hand witness accounts."
          -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"It's almost unethical to write a book on human cataclysm as

entertaining as John Kelly's The Great Mortality."
          -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The Great Mortality skillfully draws on eyewitness accounts to

construct a journal of the plague years."
          -- The New York Times Book Review

 

“Finally, a plague tale that rewards reading: 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 and John  James Audubon: The Making of An American