Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

"The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited," says an old friend of mine on Facebook. I tend to agree. What's up with this fascination so many of us hold for zombies? I'll leave that to the psych department of my school, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that our Id can indulge its hunger for inflicting violence without that pestering Super Ego telling us that such behavior is inappropriate. There's nothing inappropriate with unloading a twelve gauge in the face of the undead. The morality is delightfully simple. I would argue that this is the device behind the success of Tarrantino's Inglourious Basterds--Nazis being the closest thing we've seen to people we can kill with a free conscious. This device is why I picked up World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. However, it has nothing to do with why I liked the book so much.


Sure, there's some good zombie killing satisfaction to be had in WWZ, but what makes this novel most interesting is what it reveals about international diplomacy, military strategy, and world cultures.


The story takes place after the global zombie outbreak has been quelled and is told in the form of interviews of people around the world who experienced the crisis. We meet generals, soldiers, spies, orphaned children, and mercenaries. We hear from the Chinese doctor who discovered the first case in a rural village--a village created by citizens of an older village destroyed by the Three Gorges Dam. As news about the outbreak spreads around the world, most nations respond with skepticism--who would believe that an infection really could cause the dead to walk and eat other humans? The Israelis would. According to the Brooks' world, a nation with their history, always forced to be on guard, take unlikely threats seriously. They urge people, including Palestinians, to establish quarantine zones, which is met with an understandable lack of trust.


How does South Africa with its history of apartheid respond to a zombie invasion? How would a blind victim of the bombing of Hiroshima survive a year in the infested wilderness? How would Cuba's 50-year trade embargo help it become an economic superpower during a zombie crisis? The questions aren't practical, but the answers are revealing.


The novel also addresses some of the issues our current military faces. Wired Magazine recently published Noah Schatman's "The End of the Air War," which explains why America's dominant Air Force isn't useful in conflicts like Afghanistan. With the ubiquity of information and news, bombing a village is no longer a good way to make peace. The rules have changed.


In a zombie war the rules change even more drastically. What good is an expensive stealth bomber when fighting an enemy that can't tie a shoe, much less use radar. World War Z also exposes the importance of psychological warfare simply because zombies are immune to it. You can't discourage a zombie army into thinking the war is hopeless the way the allies did in World War I. They just want brains, and they're willing to seal-walk their exploded torso into a wall of bullets to get them. History books tell us World War II was a "Total War." World War Z shows us how history books lie. Expect a novel about zombies. Get a lesson in the economics and psychology of warfare.


I read somewhere that the job of a novelist is to send a character up a tree and then shake that tree to try to get him to fall out. As he hangs on, we gain insight into the character. Max Brooks sends our globalized society up a tree and shakes the hell out of it revealing insight similar to what one might find in Foreign Affairs or The Economist.

instant polling tools for the classroom

Earlier I wrote about the problem with hindsight bias and how it hinders meta cognition in students--big words that mean students don't know what they don't know and think they know what they don't know. When reviewing for an exam, many activities enable this mess by encouraging weaker students to passively observe the more accomplished students demonstrate their competence. The truth will come out in the exam, but wouldn't we all be happier if this truth revealed itself to all parties in the review process?

This is why I love pollanywhere.com. Rather than review by asking questions, I can quickly set up a series of poll questions in pollanywhere.com and project them on the screen in the front of class. Here's an example of a Hamlet identification question.

Rather than one student volunteering to answer the question, all students are required to submit their answers either by sms text message or through the web on their laptop, smartphone, or mobile internet device. Once all of the answers are submitted, I can reveal how the class did by displaying a chart of the classes answers.

Those who got the answer wrong are not publicly ridiculed because all answers are anonymous in front of the students, but the visual element of the graph undermines the hindsight bias. There's clear visual evidence that the answer they chose was incorrect.

As I teacher, I'm instantly notified of what topics are sinking in to my students and what are going over their heads. As an added bonus, I can set it up so I know who scored what answers, and can intervene and help the struggling students.

There are similar dedicated devices specifically made for this application, but they are quite expensive and only do one thing. I see pollanywhere.com as another among many reasons to push for each student in the classroom to have access to some web enabled device.

We're not there yet, but I believe that we're about to see a rush of tablets with nimble operating systems that I'd like to see in more classrooms. The mythical Apple tablet? Chrome OS? Android? Please?

The 12th Century Classroom

Some of my favorite moments teaching have been when we've decided to take class outside. Get away from the desks and technology and simply have a conversation. When the weather's right, I find that I'm able to reach my students in a different way. However (as I'm sure you know) there are drawbacks, even beyond weather. If the class is too big, it's difficult to hear each other. Distractions are enormous.

I feel that there is a need for a space where I could take my class that would be like going outside, but protected and sacred. I'm all for teaching in a 21st century classroom, but I'd also like to spend some time in a classroom with 12th century technology. A Yurt. A simple structure with just meditation pillows where a class could sit together and share a conversation and a cup of tea. It could create the equivalent of having class outside--a place where being thoughtful triumphs over being fast. A place (like our school's chapel) where the silence is as important as the conversation.

The essence of of a good school experience isn't embracing new technology (although that's very important), nor is it really academic content (also very important). Good schools are based on relationships and conversations among teachers and students in which inquiry and independent thinking are esteemed. A classroom designed with 12th Century Asian technology could serve as a sacred(?) space reserved for conversation, exploring ideas, and embracing thoughtfulness. Such spaces are increasingly scarce.

A place where gadgets are turned off and minds are turned on is a place where one can practice attention and focus. No glowing rectangles allowed.

Such a place would be a place that could nurture the less quantifiable elements of our work as teachers. Take students out of the classroom and they're more likely to feel inspired and creative. Again, this would be a place that honors the community of the classroom and where deeper, even quiet, thinking (as seems more common in past centuries) is honored.



Balloon boy, hindsight bias, and the problem with raised hands

My Sociology 101 professor taught me something over ten years ago that has stuck with me ever since. I struggled in that class, and once again I raised my hand and expressed my confusion. "Kevin, you know the secret to academic success." Really? I was fighting for my B+ at the time. "You know what you don't know." Later I would learn that he was referring to meta cognition--thinking about thinking--knowing what you know and don't know.

Fast forward to fall 2009. I'm reviewing for a Hamlet identification test in which I supply a series of passages from the play and my students would be required to identify the speaker and the significance. Typically I would read a quotation and ask the class to volunteer an answer. When I'm at my laziest, I call on Student A, the one who raises a hand. She responds with the correct answer. When I think about it, this accomplishes very little for any of my students. The girl with the raised hand already knows the answer so reviewing that particular item does nothing more than affirm what she already knows she knows.

Student B doesn't raise his hand, even though he knows the answer. It's safer for him to let Student A answer.

Student C knows she does not know the correct answer and naturally wants to avoid exposure to her teacher and peers. She will not raise her hand. If we're lucky she will learn the correct answer from Student A, recognize that she has some studying to do and will prepare diligently for the exam. Another possibility is that she is discouraged, feels like she's just not good at English, and decides that Shakespeare is stupid. Either way, there is no mechanism for me to intervene.

I want to focus on Student D. He does not know the correct answer, but when student A reveals the correct answer, he thinks to himself, "Oh yeah, I knew that." He is a victim of what my colleague and AP Psychology teacher, Cammy Torgenrud, identified as hindsight bias: the tendency for people to have false memories of errant predictions. Hindsight bias and meta cognition do not get along.

Many of us were victims of hindsight bias during the balloon boy fiasco. I was eating lunch at the time when my wife IM'd me about it, so we spent the next 15 minutes watching the CNN feed in horror with millions of other gullible Americans.



At some point I did write, "He's hiding in the garage. I know the type. I was a hider as a kid." However later Ria Mengin who is an editor at The Salinas Californian posted on Facebook:

Reporter instincts say: The whole "my kid's in our UFO balloon!" thing was planned to get fame/sponsors.

I noticed my brain performing fantastic gymnastics to convince myself that I too had identified the family as a fraud. In truth, I was actually suffering confirmation bias, believing that the boy was like me when I was a boy. I liked to terrify my parents by hiding. I've gotten over that. My hindsight bias struck when I (Student D) pretended that I had recognized the family's fraud once I read Ria's (Student A) post on Facebook.

In my classes, Student D needs my attention. Not just because he's not prepared for the test, but more importantly, his mindset prevents him from recognizing that he's not prepared. I'd like to provide that attention before the test, not after. In a future post I will present a cool little piece of free technology that will help me accomplish this so we could all know what we don't know.

Learning about Foreign Affairs from my student

The peace plan brokered between Russia and The Republic of Georgia with the help of France's Sarkozy still seems about as stable as York's email server as of late. Reports of Russian and Georgian soldiers sharing cigarettes with each other one minute and pointing AK-47's the next suggest this conflict may not end immediately. These events remind me of what the Christmas Truce of World War I demonstrate about the internal conflict troops face. I don't claim to know what it's like to be a soldier in a war zone, but from what I've gathered, most soldiers who experience fire don't relish the experience. As realistic as the violence in Call of Duty or Rambo may be, I don't think such entertainment media conveys the horror of warfare. Which is why, when given the choice, soldiers on opposite sides of the front are able to find common ground, which is more elusive at the negotiating table among diplomats and generals. When I read a couple weeks ago about the crisis in Georgia, I wasn't particularly surprised. Not because I'm in the habbit of staying on top of former Soviet conflicts. I do try to stay current in world affairs, but the only reason I knew about this potential crisis is because I read the essays my students write. Last spring, in my senior English class, Morgan Paull, who is preparing to head off to Harvard, interviewed a York alumnus, Irakli Chikovani '97 and wrote a compelling profile. After York, Chikovani (an AFS student from The Republic of Georgia) studied foreign relations and now works for his government as a representative for the United Nations. Morgan's piece, written last Spring, was remarkably prophetic:

Since arriving in New York, Chikovani has been working hard in the face of what could only be called daunting challenges for his country. Faced with two internal regions attempting to secede, and striving for EU and NATO membership, Chikovani and his associates have had their work cut out for them.

The difficulties of achieving these goals are sharpened by Russia's strong resistance to any attempts by former Soviet Union nations to join NATO or the EU, although prospects may have brightened for Chikovani and Georgia when President Bush declared in early April that he would stand beside his support for Georgia and Ukraine's NATO membership regardless of Russia's complaints.

How many high school teachers get to read material of such insight when grading essays?

Journey to the flat world

The first assignment I give my history students each Fall is Thomas Friedman's article, "It's a flat world after all," a condensed version of his book, "The World is Flat." Most of you all know the premise. For a variety of reasons, the global playing field has been leveled. At one time there was a significant advantage to being born in the United States, but with the ubiquity of broadband internet (among other disruptive technology) a high school student in India or China now has many of the same opportunities as a student in California. It's a bit of a wake-up call for my students.

I see the flat world everywhere I look. My favorite example is the popular power ballad band, Journey. Ever since Steve Perry and his signature voice left the band in the 80's, founder Neil Schon struggled to find a suitable replacement. Various singers were hired, but none really caught a lot of attention. Back then, Journey held auditions, listening to a handful of vocalists who were well-connected enough to get their feet in the door, but the pool of applicants was quite small, and no one was able to match Perry.

But in 2007, YouTube changed everything. Schon was surfing the web and stumbled across a video from the Filipino Journey tribute band The Zoo. The singer, Arnel Pineda, was a dead ringer for Steve Perry. He was the best Steve Perry in the world, and Schon was able to find him only because of the internet. Here's the video Schon saw:



Last fall we watched the (new) Journey play at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA. The most interesting thing about the concert was not on the stage. It was the audience. It wasn't just a bunch of has-beens from the 70's trying to relive the glory years, nor was it just a crowd of Gen X'ers, like me, trying to decide if their taste for Journey was ironic or genuine. No, the most striking element was that the Filipino / American community of Northern California came out in droves. They packed the kids and grandma in the car to see a extremely talented yet unknown Filipino singer formerly of a small cover band live the dream.

There was some skepticism from the crowd before the headliners took the stage. Steve Perry is a local San Francisco guy. Shoreline posted a number for the audience to text messages on the jumbo trons, and among the "Journey ROX!" and "Janice, I LUV U" posts, there were more than a few messages that read, "We want Steve!"

But once Pineda took the stage in the leather pants to match his long black hair and began singing, "Never Walk Away" the audience got into it. But by the time they got to "Don't Stop Believin'" we all started to wonder, does this guy do Steve Perry better than Steve Perry? For me the answer is yes.

So I told this story to my students, all of whom attend a well respected independent school known for its high achieving students. Among students in California, they rank pretty high up there. Some of them might even be considered one out of a thousand. But when students are competing in the marketplace with students from India, China, and yes The Philippines, one out of a thousand means there are two million people just as good or better. "Better do your homework."

Pineda had no L.A. connections. Indeed, the guy lived on an island on the other side of the planet. But, he was arguably the best Steve Perry out of six billion, and, most remarkably, he was found. The internet has its pitfalls. But one thing I have seen it do is make the world a fairer (or, as Friedman would say, flatter) place, and if it makes 80's rock rock harder, then I'm all for it.