In elementary school, and unfortunatelyoften later too, children are subjected to a very simplistic view ofhistory. There is the time before the middle ages (or “darkages”), there is the medieval period, and there is after.
I'm a sucker for well-done parodies because while they mock the original creation, they also show a deep knowledge of it. And that very knowledge, which the reader can recognise and appreciate in this book, is what makes Pat the Zombie so great.
This is quite a thin book. I picked it up in an airport bookshop confident that two weeks in rural France (near Vesoul - a really boring place you have to visit anyway) would just about be good for 161 pages of more of the same, boring, economic drivel.
You can't feed six billion people without it. I'm reading The End Of Food right now. The level of societal change we would have to undertake to revert 80% of the population to manual food production would (will) be impossible.
My on going reading has led me through Coupland's Player One, Saul's The Collapse of Globalism, and Wright's A Brief History of Progress. I'm currently on John Birmingham's After America, an alternate history novel about what would have happened if a freak event had wiped out almost all of Continental North America on the eve of the Iraq invasion (if you like Tom Clancy, you'll love Birmingham).
The below article, like much posted on CoN, is intended as satire. If anything, the author feels it mocks himself, more than anything. Like everything, this should be taken in context; this is CoN, Capital of Nasty, not the Washington Post.