Journal of the Plague Year
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Cullum
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By:
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Daniel Defoe
About this listen
First published in March 1722, 57 years after the event that struck more than 100,000 people, Journal of the Plague Year is a compelling portrait of life during London's horrific bubonic plague. Through the eyes of H.F. (speculated to be Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe, from whose journals the book was supposedly adapted) we witness great grief, depravity and despair: crazed sufferers roam the streets, unearthly screams resound across the city, death carts dump their grisly loads into mass graves, and quackery and skulduggery feed on fear. But there is kindness and courage too, as mutual support and caring are upheld through the worst of days.
Defoe's Journal is considered one of the most accurate accounts of the plague, and includes many contemporary theories about the disease, along with rolls of the dead and a literary mapping of London, street by street, parish by parish. It is a fascinating and intimate account from one of the earliest proponents of the novel.
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Isolated from society in a tenement basement in St. Petersburg, a malicious former civil servant vents his resentments. In the rambling notes that follow, we are exposed to the inner turmoil of the Underground Man, who represents the voice of his generation. An emotional, paranoid knot of contradictions, the spiteful narrator is also desperate to join a society he loathes, if only to prove his superiority to it.
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Amazing
- By Bryan on 02-19-19
By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others
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Dombey and Son
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 36 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.
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Perfect pair
- By Philip on 03-25-08
By: Charles Dickens
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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With his trademark mirth and boundless charisma, actor Nick Offerman brought the loveable shenanigans of Twain's adolescent hero to life in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now, in yet another virtuosic performance, the actor proves that despite being separated by a span of over a century, his connection to the author and his work is undeniable and that theirs is a timeless collaboration that should not be missed.
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Mark Twain and Nick Offerman are a perfect match
- By Philip M. Chute on 10-23-17
By: Mark Twain
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The Gilded Age
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- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gilded Age is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era that followed the Civil War. This period is often referred to as the “Gilded Age” because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the time is exemplified through two fictional narratives: one, of the Hawkins, a poor family from Tennessee that tries to persuade the government to purchase their seventy-five thousand acres of unimproved land.
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An American classic, beautifully narrated
- By TX lilbit on 03-31-12
By: Mark Twain, and others
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Gulliver's Travels
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- Narrated by: John Tatlock
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- Unabridged
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Jonathan Swift's classic novel about the loveable Lemuel Gulliver is one that is taught in high schools around the country, and for good reason. Gulliver, who is a surgeon aboard a ship, thinks that he is about to embark on a run-of-the-mill voyage to different ports. Throughout his journey, however, there are a few events that take place that redirect his ship to unfamiliar islands. Not only are they unfamiliar to him, but they are inhabited by natives who are shaped and sized much differently than he is.
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Great book gets a great narrator a MUST listen
- By Amazon Customer on 07-12-19
By: Jonathan Swift
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Slave Life in Georgia
- A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England
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- Narrated by: Damian Salandy
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This account of the life, sufferings, and escape of a fugitive slave was published in London in 1855 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. It is the autobiography of a simple, sturdy man who spent 30 years as a slave in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.
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Slave Life in Georgia
- By Deedra on 03-27-19
By: John Brown
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- By: Frederick Douglass
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- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.
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Great Book!
- By Mama C on 03-05-11
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The Betrothed
- By: Alessandro Manzoni
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- Length: 24 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where he witnesses famine, riots, and plague - all evoked through meticulous description and with stunning immediacy.
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Fantastic reading of a great work of literature
- By Pia Crosby on 03-25-19
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Utopia
- By: Sir Thomas More
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island in this political work written in 1516. Book I of Utopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty, crime, injustice, and other ills do not exist.
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More's unobtainable vision of the ideal society
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-13
By: Sir Thomas More
What listeners say about Journal of the Plague Year
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- Robert S. Becker
- 03-06-21
Improbable Success
The subject is sickness and death. The time is the 17th century. The characters are ordinary people, neither heroes nor villains. The ending is foretold since the events are historical. The story is punctuated with statistics. Hardly a recipe for success, and yet the book is brilliant. The performance is matter of fact, almost monotonous without much emotional variation. Yet it works perfectly to make the plague seem as present now as it was then. It feels like an eyewitness account by a survivor.
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- Tad Davis
- 12-22-18
The novel as journalism
A Journal of the Plague Year isn't a novel in any conventional sense; it's a collection of statistics and anecdotes made by someone who identifies himself as a merchant, and who stayed behind when others fled. Defoe may have based it on a relative’s actual journal. The anecdotes are interesting, the statistics less so. What I found compelling about the book, even more than the facts it related, was the narrator's journalistic efforts to separate truth from falsehood by interviewing people and reviewing official documents. (The latter effort was frustrated by the Great Fire of London that swept through the following year and destroyed many of the city records.)
One aspect of the plague is dealt with at length. With the richest people fleeing for the country and with commerce at a standstill, hordes of the working poor lost their positions. Only an extensive effort at gathering and distributing charity saved these people from starvation. Otherwise the authorities would never have been able to keep the peace: the thousands of deserted houses would have been attacked by desperate mobs looking for plunder. As it was, masses of the poor fled the city and camped out in fields near a village, until they were chased down the road to a new one.
At one point as many as seven thousand people a week were dying of the plague - 50,000 dead in the space of two months. In another two-week period, 30,000 died. Funerals were impossible. Bodies were gathered by dead carts that made their rounds at night; the bodies were dumped into common pits. One drunken piper was picked up alive and thrown into the dead cart. At the last minute, about to be dumped into the pit, he came to and insisted he wasn't dead, and fortunately for him, he was believed.
Adding to the terror was the absence of any understanding of how the plague spread. It was known that being near someone who was infected made it more likely that you would get it. But no one knew the actual mechanism. A huge effort was made to rid the city of all dogs, cats, mice, and rats, but it appears that no one suspected the real culprit: fleas. (One theory was that the stench of death itself could spread the disease, so one defense was to carry around a pouncet box.) Churches closed down; if one person in a house caught the plague, the whole family was boarded up in the house and left to die. The streets were eerily quiet. An abandoned purse was left untouched until someone had the bright idea of igniting the purse with gunpowder and letting the coins it contained drop into a pail of water.
Ultimately the plague just burned itself out. No one knew why and most were left with only one explanation: God’s judgement had sent the plague, and God’s mercy ended it.
Andrew Cullum’s narration is well-paced and friendly. The book is a humane exploration of a time of great suffering.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Brett Keegan
- 05-29-21
Tedious but inciteful
Hard to get through bits, but some great insights and parallels. Not really a story.
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- Verre
- 05-01-22
Brilliant reading of the Bills of Mortality
The narration is fantastic. The story is... well, if the text were literally historical and documentary, one could forgive it being so highly repetitive (for which, by the end, the author repetitively apologizes) and full of tedious lists of actuarial statistics. Get used to hearing recitations of the Bills of Mortality, which are interesting primarily because one begins to wonder: what exactly is the fatal quality of "Teeth"?
This is a work of fiction pretending to be a documentary, but adding no real twist to the topic. Maybe I'm spoiled by fictional filmed documentaries along the lines of "Documentary Now!" (2015-present). All that fiction achieves in the present case is to make you doubt the veracity of the supposedly historical statistics. Did Defoe rely on real historic documentation? That would at least be something. But if so, why cast it as a work of fiction? It's not exactly Borges.
Still, in the interests of completion, the audiobook actually made it possible to get through this slog, which never would have happened had I relied on the written text. And there were a few moments of grim clarity, where the description of people's carelessness in the face of infection, especially after the first wave had just barely retreated, were strikingly relevant to contemporary circumstances.
With such good narration, I don't hesitate to recommend this, if you're a history buff. But is it history? The degree of research it would take to draw the line between which details are historical and which are fictional would take an academic career to unravel. On the bright side, I see that a fourth season of "Documentary Now!" is slated to be released this year...
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- N. D. Hemingway
- 10-08-20
Strong start, similarities to pandemic are uncanny
The book begins as a proper journal of life in London as the plague hits. So much of it reminds me of our current pandemic, such as people pushing fake cures, meat packers being heavily hit, and folks turning to brewing and baking at home (though out of necessity then). It offers a lot of insight into what life was like and how people were trying to get by.
From here the book shifts to a collect of secondhand stories and anecdotes, with lists of statistics thrown in as well. The latter is probably interesting for historians, but it didn't make for very good listening.
Narrator does a great job and his voice fits the vibe of the book.
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- Arne Saknussmm
- 08-21-21
Surprising
Surprisingly relevant today. People's psychology and behaviour seem to have progressed very little... Stylistically impeccable, superbly interpreted.
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- L. M. Roberts
- 05-31-20
The More Things Change, The More They Don't
The text is tedious. The language is florid and archaic (being published nearly 3 centuries ago). The narration is stilted as he necessarily over-enunciates. The material itself is dry, yet somehow all the more fascinating for all of the above.
I'm a fan of medical history, and of post-apocalyptic fiction. I was recommended this book during the time of COVID, Not sure I'd have stuck with it otherwise, this was definitely the right time for me to listen to it! The parallels are unmistakable, Human behavior has not changed, only the details have been altered. Hearing in a nearly first-person contemporary account, how statistics were altered to initially minimize and later possibly exaggerate death tolls, the proliferation of charlatans, and the influence of rumor on life-changing decisions was eye-opening and more than a little dismaying.
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3 people found this helpful
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- will
- 11-04-21
It’s a book alright.
I had to read this book for class but procrastinated too long and ended up downing 5 shots of espresso and listening to most of it on 2x speed. It was not an ideal experience.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 07-29-20
history brought vividly to life
A Journal of the Plague Year surprised me. I didn't expect to enjoy it and only picked it up thanks to a group's choice, and the fact that we are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. But I found this book much easier to read and more interesting than I expected it to be. Defoe includes loads of facts, numbers and statistics, making it more journalism than anything. But the fact that he centers the story of that one year on one man's view of London and everything that happened, allowed it to read more easily and enjoyably.
Defoe himself was only 5 years old at the time the book took place so his memory was likely very limited. However, he describes the sights and sounds and smells of London so vividly that it feels as though this is actually his real journal. The atmosphere of place is tangible on every page. And for me this is what made the book enjoyable. It isn't a book with plot or even much character development. It is truly about one place in one specific time. And it is so rich in the description of that place that the reader can see it like a movie in their minds.
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- Anna Tolentino
- 06-20-21
reading could have been better
wanted so much to listen this book. but voice is so robotic. why why why
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2 people found this helpful