Total Page : 352
Publisher : Book Jungle
Publication Date : 2007 09 06
>> Entertaining Historical Work Marred by Lack of Proofreading
I have long wanted to read this classic account of the Black Death in London Couldn t believe all the typos which a notice at the beginning attributes to OCR the pages are scanned rather than typed The publisher s excuse is they need to keep costs down Like they couldn t find a graduate student in English or History who wanted to pick up a bit of money proofreading I would rather pay more for a properly edited book
>> Why Teens Should Read This
1 Defoe is fascinating biography subject
Ian Watt remarked that Defoe was a hard man who led a hard life raised as a Dissenter in the London of the Great Plague and Great Fire enduring Newgate prison and the pillory in bankrupt middle age working as a secret agent and a scandalous journalist until imprisoned again for debt and treason Defoe died old and so may be accounted as a survivor but he had endured a good share of reality and his novels reflect that endurance
2 Observing and personalizing real world problems can inspire you to read and enjoy related literature Thank G d the H1N1 Flu causes mild to moderate symptoms despite its fierce contagiousness However I m sure most of your mothers and others have made anxiety ridden phone calls to the pediatrician We live in a Global Village How long is it before one rural Chinese farmer falls ill and China Air cancels flights out of Beijing Even the Plague today having a mere 15 mortality rate down from the Medieval high of 75 can still wreak havoc And it is a fact that the recent completion of the Kinshasa Highway enabled the transmission of AIDS epidemic throughout Africa Is it so far fetched Someone collapses in Cape Town schools close across Europe ports are inspected along the Atlantic shore riots break out surrounding Kaiser Permanente Japanese civilians receive face masks from their government DeFoe s London is a microcosm of our world
3 In order for you to like reading you have to be exposed to a variety of genres to help discover your own interests The Journal of the Plague Year is a great introduction to Historical Fiction or even Literary Journalism even if it was written so early that the genre would not yet be coined for a few hundred years After all Defoe is credited with being one of the earliest innovators of the novel itself I personally love the genre it makes me fell like I m time traveling sans jet lag Historical fiction by the way is also popular genre for mini series HBO is particularly good for shows like Deadwood Rome John Adams and The Tudors
>> A Journal of the Plague Year 1722
Plot Kernel A survivor of the plague of 1665 in London recounts the event He tells of the shutting up and guarding of houses where anyone infected resides imprisoning the entire household because of the illness of one of the anger and despair of those shut in and of the strategies used to trick the watchmen and sometimes escape He tells of the dead carts and the great pits where the dead were thrown and buried He meets a man whose wife and children are shut in but he is not and how he provides for them He relates a story he was told of a group of uninfected people who fled the city and the difficulties they had with the distrust of others He discusses the numbers dead the sweep of the pestilence and the effects of it on England s trade with other countries
Note There isn t any actual plot in the sense of a character contending against difficulties and reaching some sort of resolution The narrator is merely an observer to whom nothing significant happens The text has no chapter breaks or section breaks The narrative rambles is repetitive and is only loosely structured It is a fictional account of an actual event Defoe was five years old in 1665
The book from which I read this novel is not the one under which this review is placed The book I have is a volume in the Library of Essential Writers not listed on amazon and contains five of Defoe s novels There is only a short biographical introduction and nothing concerning the content of the novels so I don t know whether Defoe s account of the plague is accurate in the details of its spread the degree of its contagion the measure of law enforced the behavior of those infected the caution and fright or of anything else that would be discussed in a scholarly introduction to the novel
