I'm waiting for a better copy of Veeck as in Wreck to arrive, and so I thought I'd peruse some plague lit. I chose Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It's about an historian (an ) who is supposed to go back in time to 1320. But, if I am guessing right, she appears to have missed her mark and is now in the time of the Black Death.

Interesting premise, but this book is so damn slow . . .

Best summary of the Black Death I have read was chapter 1 of John J. Robinson's Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. Robinson wrote an awesome book on the Knights Templar. I wrote a story in high school about a Chicago Catholic school that clandestinely was run by the Templars. The story was a laugh riot!

Doomsday Book was, overall, decent, but I read it on my phone and didn't expect it to take me twenty hours to read. The book is 600 pages, and not a lot happens in the first 350. The story of the main character in the plague was great, but there's this whole other story (set in the present) that is slow, repetitive, and full of idiotic minor characters.

I got one for you Tommy. Eifelheim


In 1349, Eifelheim, a small town in the Black Forest of Germany, vanished: it ceased to appear on any maps or in any documents, having apparently been abandoned and never resettled by its community. The disappearance is no mystery — the Black Death devastated Europe. But why was the area never resettled, unlike most other depopulated areas? The mystery intrigues cliometric historian Tom Schwoerin, who sets out to solve the puzzle with the help of his partner, theoretical physicist Sharon Nagy. They gradually uncover evidence of an alien crash-landing in the area.

Read first chapter while fielding these calls from students. So far, so good. I keep seeing this guy, though:

The Last Tribe

Pandemic outbreak and a family tries to come together from across the country to survive.

Not terrible so far.

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A cool if somewhat simplistic book:

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Nice, please update at the end.

Totally agree. Lots of fun, but arbitrary as fuck.

Bought that book for my dad as one of the last Christmas gifts my parents would accept. No. It wasn’t the trigger for that decision as it was something he wanted... now it’s in my house somewhere because my brother and I are the repositories of items he no longer wants but won’t throw away... anyone want a Sony Walkman from 1995? It’s water proof.

I got that book as a Christmas gift from my Brother-in-law a few years ago. "Who do we know that likes depressing books?" "Sam?" "Yeah, probably, OK, done and done."

Nobody's dusting off the big dogs, Camus and Garcia-Marquez, huh?

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I don't remember half the time if I'm hiding or I'm lost

I cannot stand this piece of shit.

This book will have you not sleeping for weeks:


WHen I read it for the first time I knew nothing of Ebola except for some vague shit. After this I was keyed in on it. I even went to the site when I visited DC one year.

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

Halfway through this, Nardi. Good call. Like Doomsday Book, the medieval parts are much better than the modern parts.

The Methuselah Enzyme isn't actually a "plague book" but it's pretty relevant because it concerns rich and powerful old people destroying the lives of younger and less powerful people so that they can stay alive longer.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765317735

White Plague

By: Frank Herbert

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The Stand

Stephen King

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Great plot but there's no way I'm going to wrap my head around a world with no women. The possibilities are endlessly disgusting.

Inferno by Dan Brown (also made into a movie).

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Can you elaborate? I read it about 11 years ago, and I remember not exactly thinking it explained everything, but was still a good read.

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I read it on vacation once and it was pretty interesting, and never thought much about it again. Read some criticisms later and I was like, yeah, it’s weirdly white makes rightish.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropolog ... ame=iossmf

Agreed. With pretty much everything that King writes, he had a cool idea and couldn't stick the landing. If the 'good guys' were not in the book, it would have ended the same way...and been 500 pages shorter.

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Actual anthropologists, historians, and geographers say (among other things) that Diamond presents a deterministic view of people and history, almost like vulgar Marxism, and that totally shows in his book. I know he's a popularizer, and that's cool, but even I could tell that he left a bunch of shit out. (It's my Cherokee Theory.)

Other people complained that he didn't do his own research, and I heard someone from U of C say he could come with three other categories and do what Diamond done did (church, crops, and Fordism or something). I can't comment much on any of that.

Shoutout to that mafucker Nardi.

Eifelheim was a (LONG but) good book. Really kind of touching, but depressing as all hell.

The funny thing is that I just finished a double-narrative, 600 page sci-fi novel about the Black Death (Doomsday Book), and while I ended up enjoying it, vowed to never do it again, I decided to take Nardi's recommendation because he's cool and a solid poster. I had the book on my phone, and after ten or so hours, I peeked at the percentage, and goddamn if it didn't say I was 33% of the way through the book. Not again! I looked online and Eifelheim is 550 pages. "Dad gomit," I said.

But the descriptions of life in this medieval village in the Black Forest were interesting, and the main character (Father Dietrich) seemed like a cool guy, so I persisted. And it was rewarding, in an optimistic, almost sweet sort of way. There's no deliverance--it's the plague, man, starvation looms for (spoiler removed), and they all know the end is coming--but at least there was some hope in it. I'm gonna read this one again sometime.

Aliens plus medieval times. Like taking a bite of cake and then taking a bite of a pickle. Pickle cake. Oddly delicious

Want to read more histories, but I forgot about this novel:

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly.

It's a fun book about the plague, very informative and often funny. Offers a good account of where the plague may have started and the various ways it got into Europe. The writer then moves from area to area, discussing how the people dealt with the plague.

The problem I have with it is that it starts to read a little bit like a gossip column for the medieval gentry. I am aware of the fact that you can't talk too much about peasants, because apart from parish records, there's precious little narrative about them, but I got a little sick of hearing about Petrarch, the Queen of Naples, and the fancy-ass popes.