A historical novel of prejudice and plague, The Scourges of Heaven sweeps gracefully, joyfully, painfully across centuries and generations. Through Cynthia Anne Ferguson, orphaned aboard a vessel carrying immigrants, hopes, dreams, and cholera from the Old World to the New, David Dick paints a world where the causes of disease are little understood, where faith is not always a comfort, where human questioning often goes unanswered, and where unexpected death is frequently attributed to the wrath of an angry God. Cynthia's story unfolds in the midst of the first of four great cholera epidemics to sweep America in the mid-nineteenth century, and her journey through life, from New Orleans up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and across the Bluegrass to Lexington, parallels the track followed by the deadly scourge. More powerfully told than any factual, statistical, or scientific account could ever manage, yet based upon historical events, this tale of disease, ignorance, and narrow-mindedness is supported by a central theme of hope that ultimately brings redemption.

Like a latter-day Voltaire, Dick takes us on a Candide-like adventure through the violence, prejudices, injustices, superstitions, greed, and occasional enlightenments and reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. - Wade Hall

David Dick, Emmy-Award-winning CBS news correspondent and former director of the School of Journalism at the University of Kentucky, is the author of many books, including Follow the Storm: A Long Way Home and The View From Plum Lick.