by Daniel Defoe, Paula R. Backsheider
3.5 to 4 stars, read for university.
I find it difficult to give this a rating not only because of what it is--a book that straddles the fiction/non-fiction line, written centuries ago--but also because of the reasons I read it. I wasn't looking for the story, but for insight into the time period, the science and the language and the p...
Considered as a work of fiction, it's not much of a novel, rambling around and sometimes repeating itself, including some dry details about the numbers of dead (including charts). However, as an account of the plague, written by someone who experienced it, it's pretty fascinating.
This was a very interesting read, but it was also very difficult to follow. The lack of chapters, meandering streams of thought, and repetition caused me to skim large chunks of the book. Being a first of it's kind, that was to be expected.It was interesting to see how they tried to contain the outb...
Even though it's a fictional journal this book reflects the haunting reality of the plague days. The text meant to be a journal there's no real plot in it but many short stories of victims and comments on the way the disease was handled. Not all that entertaining but very informative.
Defoe was a young child in 1665. What's best about A Journal of the Plague Year is the lengths to which Defoe goes to cause the reader to believe that this is in fact a journal and not a novel. His narrator repeatedly reports sets of death statistics, analyzing them for evidence that cases of the pl...
Not for the faint hearted as this was solid text on a gruelling subject. Seeing as this was written some decades after the events I wonder why the great fire was not mentioned - maybe the answer lies in the fact that DeFoe and his contempories did not know that the fire cleansed the area. *shrug* Wh...
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