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And the third book I would discuss is one in which that
evil time fell upon the city of Oran in southern Africa and
Algeria in northern Africa. It's a book written by Albert
Camus, an atheist and existentialist, certainly a stoic.
Born in Algeria in 1913 he was a writer in France during
World War II, where he was a resistance fighter. In 1948
he wrote his book The Plague, which won him a Nobel Prize.
He was the darling of the avant-garde; died in an automobile
accident in 1960. It's a fiction story about the evil that
fell Oran, a city known for its banality. It was a worn
out city, a common place city in which rats suddenly started
to die sometime in the 1940's. People were loathe to mention
the word plague. Plague has a very nasty meaning to most
Old World people. The history is as serious as that of war.
One documented plague in Constantinople cost the city ten
thousand dead per day for awhile. Finally, it became clear
that not only were the rats sick, but the people started to
become sick with the bubonic plague, a terrible way to die,
with big festered sores, usually in the groin that had to
be lanced and a high fever through which a person either does
or does not live. And of course it is very contagious. The
story was gory in its detail about how they had to try to
keep people seperated. The town, of course, was sealed off
by the Prefect. The people were trapped there. There's no talk
od communication outside the town. But how these characters
lived within this dilemma is the story.

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