New book about the Black Death

[Adrian II]

By the look of some reviews, THE GREAT MORTALITY, An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly, (2005, HarperCollins, 364 pages) must be very interesting. They say it summarizes a lot of scholarship without sacrificing the big picture or losing the lay reader.

As Kelly puts it, "the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, swallowed Eurasia the way a snake swallows a rabbit -- whole, virtually in a single sitting. From China in the east to Greenland in the west, from Siberia in the north to India in the south, the plague blighted lives everywhere, including in the ancient societies of the Middle East: Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.