I’ve read and written about this book before, but since I listened to the abridged audiobook this weekend and wanted to reread the whole thing. This time as I read it, I started to realized that when you’ve earned a degree in English, it gets kind of hard to stop looking for hidden meaning. (The Onion has a funny article about a grad student who deconstructed his take out menu.) As I read World War Z this time, I found myself seeing satire all over the place.
As I read about the politicians, I was trying to guess which current politicians Brooks was hinting at. Plus, even though I think this is a fantastically terrifying book, I think that Brooks gets in a lot of digs on the way Americans live right now, our celebrity culture, what we eat, our materialism. I know that Brooks did this on purpose, but who expects subtle satire in a book about a zombie take over of the world?