JOHN KELLY
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death

Medieval Europeans called it “la moria grandissima” (“Big Death”). Medieval Muslims called it the Year of Annihilation. It is known today as the Black Death: a pandemic plague that, from the early 1330s to the early 1350s, ravaged Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa, killing as much as two-thirds of the population in some areas. At the time, it seemed, in the words of one observer, “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion.”

In “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death” (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $25.95), John Kelly provides a palpable account of the horrors and anomie the plague produced across the Medieval world, drawing on firsthand accounts of the destruction that are, by turns, lyrical and terrifying.

The plague’s origins remain obscure, but Mr. Kelly contends that it originated in inner Asia, near the Gobi desert. The plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, was spread primarily via rodent fleas. They found their way into Europe, he claims, on the ships of Italian merchants who were fleeing hostile Mongols. The virus then spread across the entire Continent. Doctors of the age believed it was primarily the result of bad air. They advised people to steer clear of stagnant bodies of water, keep a good diet, and avoid “accidents of the soul,” or emotional upset. This did not particularly help.

Some leaders, such as Pope Clement VI of Avignon, simply fled their countries. England’s king, Edward III, warned “a just God now visits the sons of men and lashes the world.” King Magnus II of Sweden ordered that no food be eaten on Fridays and no shoes be worn on Sundays.

Then there is the story of John Ronewyk, the manager of a large manor in southern England with three to four thousand workers. Between 1348 and 1350, at the height of the plague, as his help was steadily dying off and his funds dwindling, he remained in the countryside to quietly, vigorously administer to the land, turning a decent harvest each year. Mr. Kelly lauds him as a symbol of “order, self-discipline, and lawfulness” that functioned as a bulwark against chaos.

The pandemic provoked a virulent strain of anti-Semitism, which Mr. Kelly vividly describes. Jews were accused of introducing and propagating the disease by poisoning water wells. Their goal, many Christians claimed, was world domination. Pogroms were conducted in Spain, France, and Germany, whereby Jews were thrown down wells and burned alive. One leader in Erfurt exhorted his followers to track down Jews and “beat them nicely.” The few voices of dissent – people who wondered why, if the Jews intended to take over, they, too, were dying of the disease in great numbers – were muffled by the blanket of fanaticism spread across the European heartland.

After the pandemic, the plague returned to Europe during the Renaissance, but rarely with the ferocity it initially possessed. The anthropologist Wendy Orent has theorized that the reason for this is that Y. pestis risked its own obsolescence by wiping out nearly all of humanity, and it contracted its scope, returning to its original rodent hosts, to stay alive.

The Black Death may have done Europe good, Mr. Kelly concludes. During the two centuries prior to its outbreak, rapid population growth was increasingly straining the Continent’s resources, and living standards were falling. The Renaissance was beginning, and horrors of the plague acted as a sort of scourge, leaving the land “cleansed and renewed – like the sun after rain.”

– Tayt Harlin

ELLIOTT CURRIE
The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture

What evil roils beneath the surface of suburbia is a trendy subject, treated in dozens of television films and every other cover story in New York and the New York Times Magazine. Yet it’s difficult to summon sympathy for wayward, white, middle-class delinquents, who have more options than most.

Elliott Currie wants to shake us from this indifference. In “The Road to Whatever” (Metropolitan Books, 320 pages, $26), he argues that there is now a “crisis of adolescence,” in which large numbers of middle-class children are “turning up drug addled, locked in juvenile institutions, adolescent mental health wards, and drug treatment facilities.” They are increasingly likely to kill themselves, die in traffic accidents, severely abuse illegal drugs, and binge-drink.

The author, a one-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (for 1998’s “Crime and Punishment in America”), has little patience for the usual answers: We indulge kids too much; our culture is too lenient; our juvenile justice system is too wishy-washy; our video games are too violent. Instead, he declares that America is unduly harsh in its policies toward children.

Institutions such as schools and courts have become more unforgiving in recent decades, he writes. Parents, who are likely to be divorced and overworked, have embraced a punitive “tough-love” approach to problem children, often abdicating responsibility when they misbehave. The effect has been to create a “Darwinian culture” that demands a high level of achievement from middle-class adolescents, but fails to intervene when problems arise.

Mr. Currie interviews teenagers and young adults, whose grisly stories are captured here in often excruciating detail. There are long, frank stories about “tweaking” on methamphetamine, shooting heroin on the streets, or running away from a raging alcoholic stepfather. Reading this feels oddly voyeuristic, but Mr. Currie’s sympathies are overwhelmingly with his subjects. He uses their addictions and frustrations to lob accusations at their families, their schools, the country itself.

These are “Reagan’s children,” he argues, who “grew up in a time when public investment in social services of almost any kind, for adults as well as teenagers, was under constant siege.” Claims like this feel too politicized to be credible, and he provides little data to back them up. His unfettered faith in his subjects can also be a bit hard to take – surely there’s more than one side to these stories.

Mr. Currie clearly thinks it is a mistake to treat troubled adolescents as unchangeable social menaces, whose instincts need to be punished rather than understood. But his book doesn’t begin to seriously consider the merits of the opposite position, nor the full effects of the recent shift. He is more convincing when he argues that public schools that embraced “zero-tolerance” policies during the 1990s ended up mistreating their students.

But the real scandal is in the social service agencies. Therapeutic institutions, such as drug-treatment centers, spend little time searching for the causes of problems. Instead, they have come to rely on psychotropic medication.

This books never quite proves its case that we have a “crisis” on our hands. And it is hard not to bristle when his condemnations seem instinctive, such as: “Adolescence is rarely an easy time. But it need not be as hard as it often is in America.” For all of his criticism of national policy, he never mentions the approaches of other countries.

Mr. Currie has certainly put his finger on some unfortunate trends. His prescriptions are bold (and expensive) solutions: more supportive schools; fewer punitive treatment-programs; more understanding counselors. Oh, and affordable health care, and more family-friendly social policies. Perhaps we won’t hold our breath.

– Emily Bobrow