World War Z

I loved reading this book. What a great social-commentary-meets-apocalyptic-novel for high schoolers! I think this book would fit the best in older classes, preferably second semester juniors or seniors, due to the many different vignettes taking place all over the world (requiring perhaps some course study on world governments and cultures outside the US) and the graphic and sometimes vulgar scenes and language that occasionally come up in the text.

The author of World War Z did a fantastic job being as accurate as possible and taking tomes of research into account when he predicted the different ways that cultures across the world would respond to this experience. He brought in religious implications, Western consumerism, the nature of the profiteer, and the cold way that human beings naturally respond once they are torn from their dependence on social order (and thus creating a Lord of the Flies - esque situation).

Paul Redeker's character was particularly interesting to me; in almost every crisis in human history, people are torn between leaders pushing for humanitarianism and leaders taking the "emotions" out of the situation for the most convenient and swift solution (and looking at people like numbers). The "Redeker Plan," adopted by most nations in the world and using human beings as bait to buy other refugees time, was certainly swift and logical, but also heartless and destructive. At the end of the vignette focusing on Redeker, we are shown that even he is not immune to the emotions that he blames for all the atrocities created by human beings. We later find out that he goes to a psychological rehabilitation center after his meeting explaining his plan to the leaders of the world.

The concept that human emotion is the greatest flaw in our design is an interesting one to ponder (though I don't agree). Hypothetically, if people didn't have the emotional attachment to their friends and family members who became infected, they would be able to destroy their brains quickly and with ease, thus containing the spread of the virus from reaching the pandemic proportions that it did. What a bummer life would be, though, if we could kill our "loved" ones without another thought.

To Kill a Mocking Bird

I also read To Kill a Mocking Bird as a freshman in high school, and had a completely different level of appreciation for it as an adult. The novel is ultimately, for me, about perception; people tend When I read it back then, I had a much more black-and-white (pun not intended) vision of the world. At that time, I felt it was about good and evil, and the lesson to the innocent child characters that yes, evil does indeed exist in the world, and everyone at some point comes into contact with it in some way. At the time, I felt that it was about making that realization and needing to incorporate evil into a world belief that all humans are inherently good.

As I've grown, I recognize that while I was not necessarily wrong about this at my young age, I wasn't really seeing the picture fully. It wasn't about evil and good being at the opposite ends of the spectrum; it's about both of these qualities being able to exist in a single person. It's about perception and how it is influenced by the perceptions of others, and it explores how a mob mentality of hate can overtake a large group of people, all the while they are perhaps not each inherently evil individually.