Customer Reviews

October Mourning: A Novel of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic (Autographed)

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In late 1918, World War I is winding down, but America's major cities, like Boston and Philadelphia, are being decimated by Spanish Flu.

The disease hasn't yet reached Columbia, Maryland, where Dr. Alan Keener, fresh out of medical school, treats a young mother named Sarah. She is feeling sick and feverish, classic flu symptoms, for which she is told to go home and rest. Sarah is found dead the next day, her lungs full of fluid.

The local authorities are reluctant to declare a health emergency over one death. They become convinced after the local death toll starts climbing, fast. All indoor gatherings are banned. Church services are moved outside. The local bars and taverns are forcibly closed. People start acting justifiably paranoid, afraid to leave their houses unless absolutely necessary. It becomes personal for Alan when his 5-year-old becomes one of the fatalities, and his wife almost joins her.

A traveling snake-oil salesman gets the flu, and during his flu-induced delirium, he believes that he is visited by an Angel of God. Mankind is being tested; he has been given the name of Kolas, and told to spread the disease as much as possible. Those who don't die are the new Chosen of God. After nearly infecting Alan, Kolas is captured by the police, where he is "encouraged" to give up several samples of blood to be made into a vaccine. It helps to return things back to something approaching normal.

This is a very good, and very easy to read, novel about a famous, yet unknown, bit of 20th Century American history. While reading this book, in your mind, replace all mentions of "Spanish Flu" with "bird flu." Hmmm. . .

I read October Mourning with my book club. The story is so simple that it may be a good junior reader. The flu pandemic was covered well as a piece of history, but not as a good piece of literature. The language was very unsophisticated and I was astonished at the number of typos in the text.

I was looking for a fictional history book about the 1918 flu that was not overwhelming in the scientific area surrounding this event. I found however that this book could have been written for a fifth grader. Sort of plain, not a grabbing story that I expected.

I have had 'October Mourning,' on my shelf to read for quite a while and with the recent outbreak of Swine Flu, it sparked my interest enough to finally give it a read.

This is a very historical view of the 1918 outbreak of the Spanish Flu. I understood how and why the the flu spread and what the county in the story did to try and stop the spread of flu and how they reacted to the people striken. It also showed a window of a glimpse into the politics involved with warning folks of a possible epidemic and showed old school doctors vs. more modern thinkers in terms of disease.

I did like this book, although the character of Kolas, who was spreading flu on purpose, was hard to understand at first, toward the mid and end of the book, he fit in just fine and added a little zip to the spread of the flu and the measures taken to stop it.

This is not a long book with lots of drawn out details but it is a bare bones down to the facts as it may have been during the outbreak with a great afterward on the facts and the estimated death toll the flu left behind in 1918 - a period of time that is mostly foreshadowed with WWI.

I would also recommend Albert Camus book, The Plague, if you are interested in interpersonal relationships in regards to an outbreak of flu, or are interested in the politics of outbreaks or the further dynamics of flu epidemics. I find the subject very interesting so I enjoyed both of these books. 'The Hot Zone,' by Richard Preston is also an interesting read on the subject of the Ebola Virus.

This is a good book for a pre-teen reader to help them understand the 1918 Flu Pandemic.