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.