
The Journal of the Plague Year
London, 1665
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Narrated by:
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Nelson Runger
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By:
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Daniel Defoe
About this listen
London's Great Plague of 1665 devastated the city, as Europe's final bubonic outbreak killed thousands of helpless citizens. Daniel Defoe, author of the classic Robinson Crusoe, was five years old when the Plague swept through London, and grew up hearing many stories - some truthful, others exaggerated - of its deadly effects. Blending those anecdotes with his childhood recollections and factual data from government registers, Defoe wrote this comprehensive account of what happened to London in 1665. Both a harrowing historical novel and a reliable journalistic record, Defoe recreates a living, suffering city trying to cope with an incurable, rapidly spreading disease.
©1988 Daniel Defoe (P)1988 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Writer, merchant, and spy Daniel Defoe, now best known for Robinson Crusoe, presents a fictionalized first-person account of the Great Plague that afflicted London in 1665.
The Journal of the Plague Year: London, 1665 offers detailed, journalistic scenes of shuttered London homes and storefronts and dead bodies on the streets. In some parts of the city, infected families were quarantined as the death toll climbed toward 100,000 and a sense of paranoia and terror pervaded the city.
In an American accent, Nelson Runger serves up a crisp, steady performance of Defoe’s chronicle of a historical disaster.
Critic reviews
"...the work stands as the most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess." (Anthony Burgess)
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A General History of the Pyrates
- From Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time
- By: Daniel Defoe
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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This work was published in 1724, under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson, by an unknown British author, usually assumed to be Daniel Defoe. This work is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates of that era and shaped the popular notions about pirates of the day. Included are Blackbeard, Black Bart, Jolly Roger, Anne Bonny (aka Anne Bonn), Edward Teach, Henry Avery, Mary Read, and many more.
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Horrendous Waste of John Lee’s Time and Ours
- By Blake on 01-22-20
By: Daniel Defoe
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Plagues upon the Earth
- Disease and the Course of Human History
- By: Kyle Harper
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues all around us, in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality.
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Waste of time...endless dribble.
- By Kathleen A. Massey on 12-29-21
By: Kyle Harper
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The Man Who Was Thursday
- By: G. K. Chesterton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The story begins when two poets meet. Gabriel Syme is a poet of law. Lucian Gregory is a poetic anarchist. As the poets protest their respective philosophies, they strike a challenge. In the ruckus that ensues, the Central European Council of Anarchists elects Syme to the post of Thursday, one of their seven chief council positions. Undercover. On the run, Syme meets with Sunday, the head of the council, a man so outrageously mysterious that his antics confound both the law-abiding and the anarchist.
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Indescribably good
- By Erez on 06-11-10
By: G. K. Chesterton
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The White Plague
- By: Frank Herbert
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 19 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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A warm day in Dublin, a crowded street corner. Suddenly, a car-bomb explodes, killing and injuring scores of innocent people.From the second-floor window of a building across the street, a visiting American watches, helpless, as his beloved wife and children are sacrificed in the heat and fire of someone else's cause.
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Great book and not a rip off
- By Randall on 11-09-17
By: Frank Herbert
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The Trial
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.
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We are all the straw that breaks a camel's back
- By Dan Harlow on 10-14-13
By: Franz Kafka
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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The Great Mortality
- An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
- By: John Kelly
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholars and the general public. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.
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The Great Mortality
- By Amazon Customer on 10-16-24
By: John Kelly
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Midnight Son
- By: James Dommek Jr., Josephine Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum
- Narrated by: James Dommek Jr.
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Original Recording
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James Dommek, Jr., an Alaska Native writer and musician, sheds new light on a real-life mystery that pits Native American folklore against the US justice system. In the vast Alaskan Arctic, legend has it there once lived a mythic tribe—Iñukuns—that only existed in rumors and whispers. This changed forever when an actor-turned-fugitive, Teddy Kyle Smith, had an encounter that brought Iñukuns from myth to reality. Smith was an aspiring actor with a promising career until it all came quickly crashing down with a gunshot, a manhunt, bloodshed, and other frightful events.
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It’s an Inuit Thing. You possibly don’t understand it.
- By Amazon Customer on 11-13-19
By: James Dommek Jr., and others
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The Day of the Triffids
- By: John Wyndham
- Narrated by: Kingsley Ben-Adir
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere 24 hours before is gone forever. But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world.
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Good story but outstanding narration
- By NULL VOID on 07-29-23
By: John Wyndham
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Reconnect with Nature: Lessons from the Natural World
- By: Jennifer Verdolin, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Jennifer Verdolin
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
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Across the six lessons of Reconnect with Nature: Lessons from the Natural World, author and conservationist Jennifer Verdolin draws on Indigenous traditions and contemporary science to inspire you to integrate more of the natural world into your life, no matter where you live. You’ll learn about our deep biological need for nature and about the influence that natural environments and other animals have on your day-to-day life. You’ll also be provided with activities and tools to help you be more observant about the natural world around you.
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A Clear, Balanced Approach to Learning & Self-Development .
- By No Name on 05-21-25
By: Jennifer Verdolin, and others
history repeats itself
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Great read
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Written when?!
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history fact or fiction
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Great book
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Defoe uses the framing device of fictional characters living in London throughout the epidemic as a means through which to discuss factual events while also protecting himself from criticism in case he got certain particulars incorrect. I quite enjoyed "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston, so I was drawn to how Defoe describes this great plague. It is a bit long for something that is much more descriptive than being extremely character or plot driven, but the plague vs. the city of London herself are more characters than individual people are, so I give this book a lot of slack for that.
As such, I am not an historian for this period, so I took a lot of what Defoe describes at face value. I could not help but compare and contrast how the transmission and spread of the plague, as well as how people responded to mass graves and forced shut downs, to what the United States of America has been facing since March 2020. Data suggests that nearly 100,000 out of over 700,000 (or ~15%) of the London population died from the 1665 bubonic plague, while only over 700,000 out of nearly 331 million (or ~0.15%) of the U.S. population has died thus far from COVID-19. This is not to diminish how horrible COVID has been, for we are still going through our pandemic, and with all of our medical advancements and understandings of how disease transmission and prevention works, my biggest takeaway from "A Journal of the Plague Year" is that human behavior has not changed that much in the past 350+ years.
For any infectious disease historian or researcher of this period in London's history, this is an essential read. Quite eery at times, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic I'm living through at the moment, this was a fitting October/Halloween Time read. In 10-20 years, I will be looking to read what docu-dramas have been written about 2020-2022 U.S. history. I recommend this to anyone willing to reflect on how other people across time have suffered similarly nation-stopping and panic-inducing diseases.
How History Repeats Itself...
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Thank you Audible for including it in your book list!
An eye-opening education
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Many penetrating insights by Defoe make for fascinating listening.
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Yet I Alive!
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Not compelling
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