John Kelly is an author and indepedent scholar now specializing in the intersection of European history with health, human behavior, and science, all of which were his previous subjects. His The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, published by HarperCollins in 2005 (paperback, 2006), "conveys in excruciating but necessary detail a powerful sense of just how terribly Europe suffered," said Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, while The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani said, "John Kelly gives the reader a ferocious, pictorial account of the horrible ravages of [the] plague." Kelly is at work now on The Graves Were Walking: The Great Irish Famine and the Failure of British Nation-Building, for Henry Holt, a vivid, character-driven history of the devastation of mid-19th century Ireland, drawing on never-before-published material and presenting an entirely new thesis, with significant resonance to U.S. domestic and international events today. His 1999 Three on The Edge: The Stories of Ordinary American Families In Search of a Medical Miracle (Bantam) was called, by Publishers Weekly, "A compelling, touching account, rendered without sentiment by an expert storyteller." Kelly lives in Manhattan and Berkshire County, Massachusetts.