Imagine a plague so horrific, only forty percent of the population lived to tell the tale. Written as a first-person account of the world's most dangerous pandemic, the mysterious narrator bears witness to a society that has seemingly given up hope during terrifying times. . From mounting death tolls, to horrific bodily ailments, contracting the Black Plague was considered a fate worse than death. Combining his own experiences within each of the...

The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, taking a million lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren - the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure - are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded...

Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, author Rosen tells of history's first pandemic--a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left victims from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the way for the armies of Islam. Emperor Justinian had reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals...