Human Tragedy As A Valuable Tool To Tell Compelling Non-Fiction Stories - Essay Sample

Introduction

In The Great Mortality, the author covers the period in European history when more than half of the people died because of the outbreak of the bubonic plague. Because the Black Death made no distinction between people, anyone could get it and die. For example, in the book, the author describes the grief of a father who just buried his entire family by writing "...And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."

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Kelly uses the tragic deaths caused by the Black Death in the 14th century to paint the picture that the people of the time saw the plagues as a sign of God's anger. This is because there was no scientific explanation for its causes or its symptoms. Consequently, Kelly explains that the Jewish community was blamed for the Black Death by reporting that "Medieval Europeans knew that whenever bad things happened to Christians, the Jews were to blame." People were consequently killed and mistreated for the mere fact that they were Jewish.

For example, a solar eclipse was taken as proof that 'the world was coming to end' and the next morning French citizens attacked the Jewish community in their country. These genocidal acts were justified on the grounds that a copy of a secret covenant between Muslims, social outcasts and Jews was discovered inside a casket in the home of a Jew named Bananias. This collective tragedy that the Jewish community endured was incorporated into the text of the book in a creative way to advance the plot and perhaps even, to convey the message that humans may overreact when their fundamental beliefs are threatened. This is because when the Black Death was ravaging non-Christian nations, it was taken to be proof of God's punishment of non-believers. When it spread into western Europe, Christian societies did not know how to respond.

In The Professor and the Madman, the author writes about how an American doctor suffering from a mental illness helped an English professor write the first English dictionary. The doctor, William Chester Minor, is presented as a sympathetic figure by the author whose personal tragedy was that they killed an innocent man while in a delusional state. While serving as an army surgeon during the American Civil War, he became mentally unstable so that by the time he was living in London, he was suffering from the delusion that people were planning to poison him. One unfortunate night, while suffering from the delusion he was chasing a person who had attempted to poison him, he shot an innocent man on his way to work. He was subsequently arrested and tried. Since he was found to be criminally insane, the doctor was sent to the Broadmoor insane asylum.

Professor Murray was an Oxford English Professor who believed there was a need for an English dictionary because its spread was "an essential imperial device." The doctor's family were able to pay his victim's widow a monthly stipend and she started visiting him. During her visit, she took him books and that is how Dr. Minor came across professor Murray's petition for volunteers to help him in the creation of the dictionary. Since he came from a wealthy family, he could afford to turn one of his two large cells into a library, with teak shelving from floor to ceiling, and collect rare books. The doctor focused all his attention on helping professor Murray's efforts to make the first English dictionary by searching for quotes that explained the meanings of words in the English language.

Professor Murray was impressed by the doctor's contributions that he wanted to meet him. He kept on inviting Dr. Minor to visit Oxford University but when it became clear that the doctor wouldn't go to him, he opted to go meet the doctor. The professor traveled to meet the doctor in person and it was at the end of the journey he discovered Dr. Minor was criminally insane. After the professor discovered the truth, he befriended and continued to work with the doctor on the first English dictionary. Professor Murray was obsessed about his project and appreciated Dr.Minor's good contributions. On the other hand, the insane doctor found that researching his books for quotations was how he could break his cycles of delusion. This synergy meant that when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, it used over a million quotations to define half a million English words and most of those quotations came from Dr. Minor.

Conclusion

Human tragedy can be a valuable tool to tell compelling stories. Creative Nonfiction is the genre used in both books. It can be best as writing about true stories well and the two books examine are good examples of this type of writing style.