Daniel Defoe S A Journal Of The Plague Year And Covid 19

The original Journal of the Plague Year was written by Daniel Defoe in 1639. Plagues have been a recurrent fact of life since humans have existed. A virus or a bacterium makes the jump either from an animal or from a tribe who have long been habituated to the organism, and this novel infection races through the newly exposed populace, and a huge die-off of the new hosts occurs. The last major event was the Spanish influenza at the end of WWI. There have been events of concern such as SARS and Ebola, with other lesser events such as H1N1, MERS, and Hong Kong flu. While these potentially were a major problem, the Wuhan virus has turned out to be a new plague of disastrous dimensions. It remains to be seen if the catastrophic subsequent events were due to the virus itself or the hysterical overreaction to it. As an experienced doctor, with a large active clinical practice, I found I was often being asked the same questions as many patients were totally confused by the media and the changing and contradictory pronouncement from politicians and public health. I found I was answering so many questions in the office and on Facebook that it came to me, in April of 2020, that what I was doing was in fact compiling a “Journal of a Plague Year.” This book is a collection of sequential posts, almost all completely unedited. Also included were some questions and my answers.

"We are far from knowing how and when the present pandemic will end, nor can we know what will be the most enduring stories that writers tell about it. We can, however, turn for guidance to earlier writers who confronted past plagues. Robert Zaretsky spent much of the past year working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas, tending to residents isolated by Covid-19. When not at work, he turned to great novelists, essayists, and historians of the past to help him make sense of everyday, yet often extraordinary experiences at the residence. In this book, Zaretsky adroitly weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the experiences of six major writers during their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus. Each of these enduring authors knew mass death firsthand. Thucydides survived the great plague that swept through Athens from 430 to 429 BCE and described it in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Marcus Aurelius was Rome's emperor during the Antonine Plague that raged from 165 to 180 CE. Montaigne was the mayor of Bordeaux when, in 1585, it was battered by the bubonic plague, and several of his greatest essays are marked by that experience. Defoe was, of course, the author of Journal of a Plague Year, which in turn influenced both Mary Shelley in her apocalyptic novel The Last Man and Albert Camus in The Plague. Zaretsky layers accessible discussions of these authors with his own experience of the tragedy that slowly enveloped his Texas nursing home-a tragedy that first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom Zaretsky cared for and whom we come to know. The result is an indelible work of witness and a tribute to the consoling powers of great literature"--

Disease, pestilence and contagion have been an integral component of human lives and stories. This book explores the articulations and representations of the vulnerability of life or the trauma of death in literature about epidemics both from India and around the world. This book critically engages with stories and narratives that have dealt with pandemics or epidemics in the past and in contemporary times to see how these texts present human life coming to terms with upheaval, fear and uncertainty. Set in various places and times, the literature examined in this book explores the themes of human suffering and resilience, inequality, corruption, the ruin of civilizations and the rituals of grief and remembrance. The chapters in this volume cover a wide spatio-temporal trajectory analysing the writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Jack London, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Sarat Chand, Pandita Ramabai and Christina Sweeney-Baird, among others. It gives readers a glimpse into both grounded and fantastical realities where disease and death clash with human psychology and where philosophy, politics and social values are critiqued and problematized. This book will be of interest to students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy. General readers too will find this exciting as it covers authors from across the world.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

As seen in previous pandemics, girls and young women are particularly vulnerable as social issues such as homelessness, mental healthcare, access to education, and child labor are often exacerbated. The Girl in the Pandemic considers what academics, community activists, and those working in local, national, and global NGOs are learning about the lives of girls and young women during pandemics. Drawing from a range of responses during the pandemic including first person narratives, community ethnographies, and participatory action research, this collection offers a picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic played out in eight different countries.

The History of the Plague in London is a historical novel offering an account of the dismal events caused by the Great Plague, which mercilessly struck the city of London in 1665. First published in 1722, the novel illustrates the social disorder triggered by the outbreak, while focusing on human suffering and the mere devastation occupying London at the time. Defoe opens his book with the introduction of his fictional character H.F., a middle-class man who decides to wait out the destruction of the plague instead of fleeing to safety, and is presented only by his initials throughout the novel. Consequently, the narrator records many distressing stories as experienced by London residents, including craze affected people wandering the streets aimlessly, locals trying to escape the disease infected city, and healthy families forced to confine themselves behind closed doors. Apart from these second-hand accounts, the narrator also provides a thorough explanation on how quarantine was managed and kept under control. In addition, he seeks to debunk all squalid rumors which have produced a false interpretation of the bubonic plague. However, not everything is bleak in the account, as the novel offers some affirmative evidence that humanity is still capable of charity, kindness and mercy even in the midst of chaos and confusion. Although regarded as a work of fiction, the author engrosses with his insertion of statistics, government reports and charts which further validate the novel as a precise portrayal the Great Plague.

The village of Parliament has a colourful history of conflict, great oratory, wit and repartee, strange customs and larger-than-life characters, and this rich and entertaining miscellany embraces them all. On his enthralling textual tour, Robert Rogers, the Clerk of the House of Commons, looks not only at the memorable and often fiery politicians who have dominated the House over the centuries, but also at the historic building itself and the distinctive characteristics that make it so endlessly fascinating. Here too are all the famous clashes, rivalries and great events of parliamentary history, such as the fire in 1834 that destroyed the medieval buildings, the dramatic attempts to blow up and bomb Parliament, and the Prime Minister who was assassinated while he walked along its corridors. Although it's the great affairs of state that take centre stage, the book contains many odd and intriguing details, from the weight of Big Ben and what is in the dispatch boxes, to what a 'parliament heel' is and the whereabouts of the peregrine falcons' nest. As entertaining as it is informative, and written with the unique knowledge of an insider, this is an indispensable collection.

“Plague stories remind us that we cannot manage without community . . . Year of Wonders is a testament to that very notion.” – The Washington Post An unforgettable tale, set in 17th century England, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague, from the author The Secret Chord and of March, winner of the Pulitzer Prize When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders." Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing "an inspiring heroine" (The Wall Street Journal), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read.