This guest post was submitted by William Rohde.
William is a foreign affairs professional, specializing in foreign policy analysis, U.S. politics, writing, client relations, and communications. His research background and interests include Chinese foreign & security policy, U.S. national security policy, U.S.-Chinese Relations, defense issues, governance, and South Asia.
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Max Brooks’s book, World War Z is an excellent read for all of you zombie lovers out there. The book portrays (is about) humanity’s struggle against a zombie plague ( -virus) that brings mankind to the brink of annihilation and back again. Max Brooks does an extraordinary job of framing humanity’s fragility, limitations, resourcefulness and greatness in his oral history of civilizations fight for survival against overwhelming odds. His unique narrative style provides a wonderful individualistic perspective on how the Zombie War impacted different parts of the world culturally and in a religious sense.
The chronicle of the Zombie War in World War Z takes you from New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve year old patient zero, to floating cities of refugees that dotted the world’s oceans, to the initial feeble attempts by the major world powers to combat the rising and walking dead, to the development of the Redeker Plan that offered humanities best hope for survival, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt that helped turned the tide in North America and paved way for plausible recovery.
Max Brooks’s portrayal of what happens to the different governments and societies around the world as they struggle to overcome the zombie plague outbreak highlights the strengths and weaknesses of nation’s global health systems across the globe.
In addition to being an excellent story about zombies, the book World War Z has been taken a step further by Brooks and can be utilized by global health policy planners as an excellent scenario of how a pandemic might impact the different nations of the world and the types of policy solutions/actions that would be needed to contain such a pandemic. From a global health standpoint the book also highlights the current strengths and weaknesses in emergency response faced by many governments across the globe in handling health emergency such as a global pandemic. The incorporation of workable policy solutions (e.g. Redeker Plan and U.S Reconstruction Plan) that could be realistically used today to contain a pandemic makes the story that more practical and connects the reader to the plausibility of the events that take place.
Have you read this book? What did you think about it? Please submit your thoughts as a comment.
