The Black Death

by Gwyneth Cravens, John S. Marr, John S. Cravens, Gwyneth; Marr

Book Overview

Drawing strongly on history, this intriguing story makes us fear for the future. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345271556
• Release Date: February 1978
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

This book was simply amazing!!!

Check it out and also check out Kate Jackson, Kathleen Robertson, and Jeffrey Nordling in Quiet Killer. It's a nice tv movie version of this book.

A pleasing 70s-style medical thriller

This 1977 novel is a fast-paced and entertaining example of a 70's thriller, and worth picking up if you can find it in a used bookstore or rummage sale. The subject matter remains relevant to comtemporary audiences, particularly in the wake of the anthrax bioterror outbreak in the eastern US in the Fall 2001. "The Black Death" will appeal to the Robin Cook / Michael Crichton audience as well as anyone with an interest in medical thrillers. The plot is straightforward: a teenage girl takes an up-close photograph of a wild rodent while vacationing in California, contracts the bacterium Yersinis pestis from it, and returns to New York City with a bad cough. What she thinks is the flu is actually highly virulent pnemonic plague, and soon a hooker and an apartment building doorman are infected and coughing up bloody sputum. City public health department director David Hart and his able nurse assistant Dolores Rodriguez must battle the indifference of the political and medical establishments in a desperate endeavor to contain the chain of transmission. If they fail, then New York City will become engulfed in an epidemic of plague (the medieval "Black Death" of the title) and thousands will die as civilization collapses around them. The unique squalor of mid-70s New York, in late summer, is communicated very well and will no doubt evoke some nostalgic (if that's the right word) feelings in readers familiar with that era. The city swelters in suffocating heat, a strike by the sanitation union means the streets are filled with mounds of putrefying garbage, city finances are so decrepit that public services- such as rodent control- are barely functioning, and crime is rampant. All of these problems combine to enhance the opportunities for plague tranmission and, while not wishing to spoil the storyline, it's clear that things will get worse before they get better. The authors show some skill in putting together a very readable and engrossing narrative while dropping medical and microbiological factoids to fill the reader in on the hows and whys of epidemiology and infectious disease control. Pnemonic plague is a fearsome condition and the arrival of what is usually an exotic and little-encountered disease in a modern metropolis is rendered with intensity and gruesome flavor. The book does suffer from the inclusion of a sub-plot involving that 70's staple, the power-mad national security director. In this case it's a General Cosgrove, whose past history of covert actions and Cold-War paranoia leads him to regard the epidemic as an opportunity to seize control of the apparatus of government. The passages outlining this conspiracy are interspersed with the main storyline and tend to slow it down and distract the reader. While the narrative does drag a bit mid-way through the book, the last 20 or so pages pick up the pace and the story becomes more suspenseful. However, the novel's ending is abrupt and underdeveloped and shows signs of an editor's too-heav

A fun and frightening forecast of a possible plague

This book helped spark my interest in epidemiology -- or should I say took it out of the boring tedium of academics and made it interesting. It was the precursor to the a genre that became popular within a few years of publication. What made the book fascinating was the author's nearly loving description of the organism Yersinia pestis and his command of the public health bureaucracy in a large city. The story opens with a young woman returning from a camping trip in the western US, during which she was bitten by the flea vector of plague. Perhaps because she is very healthy, she progresses through the bubonic phase of the disease with little distress and becomes a pneumonic carrier -- that is she is able to transmit the bacteria directly via her respiratory tract. In the dense population of New York, with a medical profession that has no familiarity with the disease or is symptoms, the plague goes undiagnised, untreated and spreads like wildfire. The bodies pile up, panic ensues, and the fun begins.John Marr has just written a new novel, The Eleventh Plague, which I look forward to enjoying as much as this one.