Book Review
Oct. 12th, 2004 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariDoomsday Book
by Connie Willis
This is the first book I've read in a very long time that made me cry. Not just misting up, out and out weeping. Like To Say Nothing of the Dog, this book is about a time-traveling historian from near-future Oxford. However, Kivrin goes to mid-14th century England and the Black Death. She ends up trapped there for three weeks because of an influenza epidemic in her own time. The Black Death killed between one third and one half of Europe, and there is no way around that. Never have I read a book that so carefully and thoroughly portrayed the horror of the plague. We all know the statistics, but most of the time we don't stop to think about what that really meant for the ordinary people living and dying through it. In the villages, not only would they have watched their families die, but also everyone they knew. And the bubonic plague was not a simple or gentle death - it was violent, painful illness. One of the things that Doomsday Book really brought home to me was that not only did the people of the 14th century not have a treatment for the Black Death, they also lacked any effective palliative care. They could not even make the victims comfortable. They could do next to nothing.
But it's not the deaths that make the book so devastating - it's Kivrin's experience as a survivor. At the end of the book, there are several small observations and things said that I just could not get through with dry eyes. Especially the "Io suuicien lui damo amo" part.
by Connie Willis
This is the first book I've read in a very long time that made me cry. Not just misting up, out and out weeping. Like To Say Nothing of the Dog, this book is about a time-traveling historian from near-future Oxford. However, Kivrin goes to mid-14th century England and the Black Death. She ends up trapped there for three weeks because of an influenza epidemic in her own time. The Black Death killed between one third and one half of Europe, and there is no way around that. Never have I read a book that so carefully and thoroughly portrayed the horror of the plague. We all know the statistics, but most of the time we don't stop to think about what that really meant for the ordinary people living and dying through it. In the villages, not only would they have watched their families die, but also everyone they knew. And the bubonic plague was not a simple or gentle death - it was violent, painful illness. One of the things that Doomsday Book really brought home to me was that not only did the people of the 14th century not have a treatment for the Black Death, they also lacked any effective palliative care. They could not even make the victims comfortable. They could do next to nothing.
But it's not the deaths that make the book so devastating - it's Kivrin's experience as a survivor. At the end of the book, there are several small observations and things said that I just could not get through with dry eyes. Especially the "Io suuicien lui damo amo" part.
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Date: 2004-10-12 06:31 pm (UTC)