World War Z

[Brandon]

I just finished the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I really enjoyed it. It is three hundred and forty-two pages of “interviews” with survivors of the world war against the living dead. In fact, Mr. Brooks’ novel is written to read like a real account of a real event. He divides his novel up into eight chapters that tell the story of the war through the interviews with soldiers, doctors, businessmen, government leaders, religious leaders, and civilian survivors of the war. This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

[Carl_Reginstein]

I just finished the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I really enjoyed it. It is three hundred and forty-two pages of “interviews” with survivors of the world war against the living dead. In fact, Mr. Brooks’ novel is written to read like a real account of a real event. He divides his novel up into eight chapters that tell the story of the war through the interviews with soldiers, doctors, businessmen, government leaders, religious leaders, and civilian survivors of the war. This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

This is my contribution to this thread.....

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=0

[samiam]

I just finished the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I really enjoyed it. It is three hundred and forty-two pages of “interviews” with survivors of the world war against the living dead. In fact, Mr. Brooks’ novel is written to read like a real account of a real event. He divides his novel up into eight chapters that tell the story of the war through the interviews with soldiers, doctors, businessmen, government leaders, religious leaders, and civilian survivors of the war. This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

This is my contribution to this thread.....

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=0

now who woulda though that you are a Rob Zombie fan....

[Carl_Reginstein]

I just finished the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I really enjoyed it. It is three hundred and forty-two pages of “interviews” with survivors of the world war against the living dead. In fact, Mr. Brooks’ novel is written to read like a real account of a real event. He divides his novel up into eight chapters that tell the story of the war through the interviews with soldiers, doctors, businessmen, government leaders, religious leaders, and civilian survivors of the war. This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

This is my contribution to this thread.....

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=0

now who woulda though that you are a Rob Zombie fan....

OK.... one more contribution.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=4

[Carl_Reginstein]

Maybe.... one more even....

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=4

It ain't the Beatles..... that's for sure!

[Jonathan Whatley]

This item, from a tiny Canadian newspaper devoted to pro-life and social conservative causes!, could have been written specifically to needle our Brandon. Also: The inevitable course in Zombie Studies!

With all this furious cultural activity around the zombie phenomenon, it is no surprise that academia is getting in on the action, and this fall the University of Baltimore offered a semester-long course in Zombie Studies. “The zombie functions as an allegory for all sorts of things that play out in our country,” instructor Arnold Blumberg explained, “whether it’s the threat of communism during the Cold War or our fears about bioterrorism in 2010.” You do not have to be pro-life to ponder what a popular fascination with homicidal dead people might mean beyond the tidy assumptions of academics, but it helps.

The Walking Dead glistens with gore, which you would have to expect from drama where most of the players are decaying. Zombie films shoulder a great deal of the burden of gleefully coarsening entertainment, since the zombie canon prescribes a shot to the head as the only way to stop the ravening hordes. The result is a matter-of-fact use of rifles, pistols, axes, crossbows, stout poles and baseball bats, employed remorselessly since, after all, you cannot really kill something that’s already dead.

More profoundly, zombie films speak to a simmering paranoia about hostility lingering beneath the placid surface of society, which might have become exaggerated lately with the so-called “culture wars” and our increasingly bipolar politics. Professor Blumberg name-checks the Cold War and the “Red Scare” which was presumed to have found its cultural shadow in films like 1956’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

In this light, there is a lot of resonance in a story about waking up discover that your neighbours, friends and family can be infected and turn on you, with the intent on transforming you into one of them – a creature with “no will of his own… walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” This description of zombies comes from Ghostbreakers, a 1948 comedy starring Bob Hope. The gag is Hope’s deadpan response: “You mean, like Democrats?”

Zombies gore-lore (Rick McGinnis, The Interim, December 8, 2010)

[SteveFoerster]

In this light, there is a lot of resonance in a story about waking up discover that your neighbours, friends and family can be infected and turn on you, with the intent on transforming you into one of them – a creature with “no will of his own… walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” This description of zombies comes from Ghostbreakers, a 1948 comedy starring Bob Hope. The gag is Hope’s deadpan response: “You mean, like Democrats?”

Hooooooope.... Chaaaaaaaaaange....

-=Steve=-

[Jonathan Whatley]

While college students in the morning can sometimes resemble a shambling horde of the undead, one course at Michigan State University hopes to use that imagery to a positive educational effect.

Instructor Glen Stutzky is launching a course titled Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse: Catastrophes and Human Behaviour [pdf] at MSU's School of Social Work. The class will look at "the nature, scope and impact of catastrophic events on individuals, families, societies, civilizations and the Earth itself," according to the course description.

The online course looks at catastrophic events in human history including the Great Plague in the 14th century and the Shensi, China earthquake in 1556, which killed more than a million people.

The course will be book-ended by "catastrophic event simulations" including one in which a coronal mass ejection creates a zombie pandemic. Students are assigned to "survivor groups" that must learn how to survive in a catastrophic environment.

"I'm using the zombie thing to hopefully make the class a little more interesting," Stuszky explained in a YouTube video. [at the link below]

Bonus points for relevance: It's fully online! For credit, 2 semester hours'.

Would you take a course about the coming zombie apocalypse? (CBC News Community Team, March 7, 2012)