Plight of the Living Dead
What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World--and Ourselves
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature—and ourselves
Zombieism isn’t just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It’s real, and it’s happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose—and even humans.
In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom.
Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again. Plight of the Living Dead is a surreal dive into a world that would be totally unbelievable if very smart scientists didn’t happen to be proving it’s real, and most troublingly—or maybe intriguingly—of all: how even we humans are affected.
“Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it.” —Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Soonish
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science writer Simon (The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar) takes a surprisingly lively and lighthearted jaunt into the world of parasites, viruses, and zombification, a process that occurs with surprising regularity in the natural world. Simon's fascination is contagious in moments where he describes the harsh brutality of nature, such as how a jewel wasp "brainwashes" a cockroach into hosting its young, or the lancet fluke whose different life cycles occur in a sheep, a snail, and an ant. The book's light touch is a double-edged sword, leading both to pithy, funny takes, such as a summation of natural selection as "Life sucks, and then you die, usually in a pretty terrible way," and eye-roll inducing quips, such as a section titled "If You Can Be My Bodyguard, I Can Be Your Long-Lost Manipulative Pal." The narrative loses steam near the end, and Simon's exploration of neuroscience advances leads him to the strained conclusion that, if humans are controlled by their DNA, everyone has a bit of the zombie in them. Despite this stretch, Simon's work is easily the most fun one could ever expect to have reading about the mind-controlling insects, insidious fungi, and parasites living alongside humanity.
