Pandemic Literature
Rowan and I reluctantly came to recognize the need for this page. We have fielded so many inquiries from customers about epidemics, pandemics, plagues, and the science behind viral “jumps” between nonhuman to human species that we thought we need to put in one place the references we offer. Fear of the invisible threat extends into the past, whether history or fiction. The present fear looms large. Being human, as Robert Burns pointed out in his poem to the mousie whose life was upset by the plow, means to project the fear into the future, which explains our rich selection of plague-haunted science fiction/horror fiction. Many smart people and good writers have devoted thought and art to considering these fears, and we invite you to calm and measure your own in such good company.
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
The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history, even more so now, when the notion of plague—be it animal or human—has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern
The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. 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. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. 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.
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.