Living with the Living Dead The wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse by Greg Garrett

I wanted to start to read immediately Living with the Living Dead The wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse by Greg Garrett when I received it. Although I lost my dad last Nov two I try all my best to staying cheerful, positive and strong.

Then it happened something involving my dad's grave and his corpse and I postponed the reading for some days.

Death is part of our life, but zombies are different "people". They're dead but "living dead." They can live in our world. They're different from us but we can see them like a sort of mirror. Why this?

The tradition of zombies is very old says Greg Garrett, and the cinema at the end of the 1960s re-launched zombies and after the success of The Walking Dead many different productions treated the topic.
Why people need the help of these scaring monsters so similar to us, because they have been alive like us for going on?

Maybe for giving an answer to all our fears. It's undoubtedly true something: that after 9/11 the relationship with death became more complicated for all the Americans and maybe it was felt like a necessity to trying to find answers also in that human sphere that it can be the other world and also the world of zombies. Maybe metabolizing "just" death was too much. Death: darkness, obscurity, a chapter completely closed in the existence of a person.
A zombie is someone else, more close to our human dimension, more able still to let us feel the sensation of life although he is not anymore in our world.

But it is also true that the world is surrounded by this mythical and pretty scaring characters from ages and our culture, the American one is impregnated by zombies. They're everywhere. Cinema, TV, but also at the supermarket, in some brands of food, I want to say, ;-) and so on.
Why this?

Apart the purest interest and fun that people have watching a movie with zombies, the undead, man thinks that zombies are fascinating.

Ken Foree described the zombie in Dawn of the Dead: "When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth."
But so zombies are creatures of Hell?

Zombies can be this and more. Undead walking on Earth for infecting people for example.

As the writer remarks, zombies becomes more "famous" when there are tragic facts unable to being explained rationally like it happened during the 1960s or also with the HIV-AIDS infection or after 9/11.

Zombies can be the cathartic escapism and answer for all the sadness, unhappiness of a population, representing also a new reality for looking under different lenses at what it is going on in the world.
Not only: zombies gives consolation because one day we all die.

Zombies breaks an important tradition: the one of the man who had always kept defined the role of death keeping it in a discreet place.

Now death is accepted and considering the turmoil in the world is part of our human existence and can happens in any moment and for any irrational reasons.

Sometimes it can be because of our fault, sometimes it is not yet arrived our moment, but other ones can decide for us like it happened for the 3000 and more victims of the 9/11 attacks and all the other ones during this long war against terrorism.

In many graves you will find the epitaph: "Prepare yourself to follow me" as writes Garrett. So true considering the mortality of men.
With my dad we did something different :-)
He was a funny and at the same time grumpy man. We wanted to play this game with death. Death happens and we can't avoid it, but we have thought at his new house, as dad called that place so scaring for him, "light"and colored and a place where everyone can think: "I am happy to be here saying to you ciao because you present me joy, serenity and...life!" Dad loved wine and he was a man plenty of great memorable stories and saying. Once he started to saying: "Don't start to walk if your mouth doesn't taste of wine."A tribute to life. We asked for this epitaph because we are here for living before to dying and also for keeping light a grave because death is never simple and it's better to stay cheerful and remembering the beauty of the life lived.

Death received corporeality in many ways during the time. The dance of death one of the most famous manifestation, and then in various tales by Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
Zombies are helpful because they can help us to understand this transition from a condition to another, analyzing later our human condition seeing also under the various religious confessions.

The analysis of McCormack's book The Road is very interesting because a father and a son survive after a post apocalyptic scenario and the old rules of the world are all gone: church, traditions, law, normality, nothing is more true but when there is their triumph the world becomes anarchic.

Let's remember the 9/11 attacks. There is nothing to do: that one has been the first terrible moment in which not only vulnerability but also important questions rises the mind of the relatives of all the people involved in this mess. I can tell you I had two correspondents in NYC and these questions never abandoned me as well, although they're alive, because their life changed forever after this terrorist attack.

"Why did it happened to our dear ones?" What kind of justification can we find for a horror like that one?

The only justification was surely a moment of disorder under many aspects but the most terrible fear another one according to Garrett:  that Americans could become monsters after the confrontations with the terrorists killed all that people.

An anarchic world the one of the zombies can't be a good answer because everything would be permitted. Garrett will also talk of the alliance between Tony Blair and George W.Bush Jr. for fighting the war against the terrorism. "When we go over the Dark Side, it is possible that we will become more not less like the implacable foes we oppose" says Mr Niebuhr.

This book by Greg Garrett is surely a good trip in the world of zombies, current and past events, death but most importantly is a trip, a good one you can do, trust me, into our most profound fears, in the problematic still unsorted out by our society. A society not anymore beauty like the one that was just 25 years ago but plenty of stress and worries and in search of answers.

That's why it is important to read this book. For exorcising our fears and our problems.

I thank Oxford University Press for the physical copy of this book!

Anna Maria Polidori