The great mortality

Equal parts fascinating but completely grim.

I am not a squeamish person at all, but I'll be happy to never hear the term ‘anal leakage' again during an audiobook. That is all.

I wanted to like this book so much, but in the end I was annoyed that I had to continue reading it. The author constantly goes off on tangents, some of which are admittedly interesting, but actually have very little to do with the subject matter at hand. At one point, he spends 7 pages telling us the story of Cola di Rienzo only to then say at the end that di Rienzo was safely out of the city when the plague actually hits. So what was the point of telling us about him? I feel like the writer spent a lot of time just telling us somewhat interesting little tidbits about Middle Ages Europe because he came across them on his research.

He constantly applies modern cultural references to the Middle Ages stating that Petrarch wouldn't have been out of place on the cover of People magazine and that loosely clothed women were the Middle Ages equivalent of the Spice Girls. Awful stuff.

Most egregious of all though is his tendency to just make up stuff. Early on, he describes, in great detail, the excruciating last few days of a dying couple Kutluk and Magnu-Kelka. None of this is of course known at all. The only known information about this couple is that their headstone mentions they died of the plague. Kelly uses this “to suggest the following scenario” and spends more than a page making up a story.

I mostly hated this book, but I'm giving it 2 stars because the subject matter itself was interesting.