
Plight of the Living Dead by Matt Simon

TITLE: Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal about Our World --And Ourselves.
AUTHOR: Matt Simon
DATE PUBLISHED: 2018
FORMAT: paperback
ISBN-13: 9780143131410
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DESCRIPTION:
"A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature--and ourselves.
Zombieism isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose--and even humans.
In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom.
Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again. Plight of the Living Dead is a surreal dive into a world that would be totally unbelievable if very smart scientists didn't happen to be proving it's real, and most troublingly--or maybe intriguingly--of all: how even we humans are affected."
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An entertaining and fascinating pop-science book that takes a look at a variety of parasites that take over or otherwise "zombify" their hosts. This book has more meat than the author's previous book (The Wasp that Brainwashed the Caterpillar), but it did miss the opportunity to add colour photographs of some of the more visual parasitic phenomena.