by Daniel Defoe (Author), Ulrich Baer (Afterword by)
When the plague swept through London in 1665 and killed twenty percent of its population who ended up in hastily dug mass graves, five-year old Daniel Defoe survived because his family left the city. In 1722 the author of Robinson Crusoe and other classic books published this path-breaking account of the human responses to a horrendous pandemic with no visible cause, based on an uncle's journals. Combining unusual curiosity and actual historical data with deep compassion, Defoe chronicles his fellow-citizen's disbelief and denial at the first cases, the desperate escapes from a ravaged London, and the alternately charitable and callous but heartrending stories of those who lived through it or died. A Journal of the Plague Year reveals with undiminished urgency how we make sense of our role in a cataclysmic historical event when many of the rules, expectations, and acts of creating meaning have been upended.