Order this book from Amazon.com The Scarlet Plague Jack London New York City: Macmillan Co., 1915 Recommended by: Milton Friedman, Ph.D. "Jack London wrote a marvelous book called The Scarlet Plague, which I must say for some reason is the one book I remember best out of that period. The Scarlet Plague is a novel, and it has to do with an illness, the scarlet plague, that comes to the country. People die out all over the world, all over the United States, except for small isolated colonies that are left. Advanced civilization collapses, the buildings in New York are empty, and so on. Here is a boy who is suddenly growing up -- in the wilderness of California as it happens -- and he stumbles over a railroad track, which has by now been almost buried in the dirt. He asks his grandfather or his father about that, and then you hear the story about this plague that wiped out mankind, and how in isolated places they are gradually coming back. I don't know why that one stuck in my mind so much, but it did." About the Book A harrowing vision of a post-apocalyptic future. "That was the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord!--think of it! Sixty years ago, and I am the only person alive to-day that lived in those times."