John Kelly

John Kelly is a bestselling narrative history fiction author that is best known for his debut novel “The Great Mortality.”

He published the novel in 2005 and the novel went on to become a bestselling title. This would provide the platform for the works that he would write after that which would become just as popular.

“The Great Mortality” provides insights into one of the most devastating plagues of all time. It looks into a natural disaster that is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people in Europe during the 14th century.

John Kelly has become known for enlivening his narrative history fiction works with contemporary eyewitness accounts as he traces devastating historical events that have had a huge impact on world history.

Richard Rhodes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist called his debut a humane, powerful, moving, and rich work full of important lessons that is engaging, well-written, and deeply researched.
 
After achieving a lot of commercial and critical success with his first work, John Kelly would become an author of several narrative historical fiction works.

He is also the author of more than ten works on human behavior and science. Kelly has penned books in medicine such as “Three on the Edge,” a book about clinical trials. He has also written about psychology.

For his work, he has often been invited to speak on many prestigious platforms.
He has been a speaker at the History Network, the Smithsonian Institution, C-Span, Princeton University, NPR, New York University, and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts among many other places.

He now shuttles between his two homes in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and Manhattan in New York.
 
“The Great Mortality” by John Kelly tells the story of how the “Black Death” ravaged Europe during the middle of the 14th century and killed more than a third of the population.

The work draws on firsthand accounts and recent research as the author describes how infected rats were introduced by trading ships from Genoa, which had docked in Sicily.

The rats had fleas that spread disease when they bit other rats or humans. Those stricken by pneumonic and bubonic plagues, which were the main types of disease would die very quickly.

Many survivors often tried to run but the plague took over villages and towns so quickly that almost no one could outrun it.

Kelly writes about the different reactions to the plague in vivid detail. For instance, Venetians came up with a civic response to the plague even as Avignon fell apart.
John also chronicles the emergence of the unruly gangs known as “the Flagellants” who strongly believed that God was punishing humanity with the plague.

These gangs used to roam the countryside flogging themselves with spiked whips as a form of penance. At some point, they began blaming the Jews whom they rounded up and burned causing widespread antisemitism.
 
John Kelly’s novel “The Graves Are Walking” is a compelling and deeply researched work that tells of the awful story of the Great Irish Famine.

The famine began in 1845 and when it was all over more than one million children, women and men would be dead and more than two million had left Ireland.

In terms of mortality, this was the nineteenth century’s worst human disaster that killed more people than even the American Civil War.

It was the perfect storm of religious intolerance, political greed, and bacterial infection, which was the genesis of the catastrophe.

But what most people do not know is that the disaster also had political underpinnings. In this book, Kelly offers fresh insights into the role that British policies played in making a bad situation even worse.

During this time Britain was engaged in trying to change Irish character and society and this only made things worse.

There was also a lot of political ideology, religious dogma, racial ideology, and anti-relief sentiment which combined to make for a devastating disaster that resulted in a lot of human suffering.
 
“Never Surrender” by John Kelly is a work set in 1940 in London which was a place of great conflict and fear.

Everyone lived in fear as civilization itself seemed to be in danger of destruction. The German blitzkrieg had overwhelmed Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, and France and is now a menace over the British skies.

The members of the war cabinet in Britain are divided, losing their control and bickering over whether they need to negotiate with Germany or continue to fight.
Lord Halifax is of the view that prudence is the only way while Churchill is the leader of the fight to the end faction. In this work, we are presented with imperfect but complex men who hold the fate of the British Empire in their hands.

The author draws on memoirs, War Cabinet papers, memoirs, government documents, newspaper accounts, and private diaries as he provides an account of the “Supreme Question” of whether to surrender or not.

Kelly will take you from the American embassy in London to the battlefield, to life with ordinary Britons, to the government ministries, to the Anglo-French conference in London and Paris, and to the British high command.

It makes for an interesting look into what has to be one of the most important events that shaped the nineteenth century.