This was a fascinating book, written in the style of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," telling familiar stories from history but acknowledging the important roles played by groups that are usually left out of those stories. Zinn acknowledged the downtroddren, the poor, and minorities. Miller gives zombies their due.
Using the initial premise that the zombie virus was already loose in North America when Columbus arrived (with zombies co-existing with Native Americans who had learned to co-exist with them), this book creates a rich alternate history of the U.S., one in which our national heroes (like Ben Franklin, Davey Crockett, and Teddy Roosevelt) all deal with zombies in one way or another as zombies' role in American society change and evolve from historical to era or era.
Miller is obviously a knowledgeable historian (the book credits him as a Professor of Zombology, although I assume he actually teaches either American history or creative writing, perhaps both), and the way he weaves zombies into both familiar and obscure episodes of U.S. history is at once fascinating, hilarious, and bizarrely plausible. Apparently America used to have wild herds of zombies roaming the countryside. Then, as westward expansion occurred, zombies were pushed further west, hunted to near extinction, and then pushed into hiding as an exploited underclass (in this book, zombies are a metaphor for every minority under the sun, from slaves to immigrants to communists to homosexuals, to hilarious effect and with intricate detail). In the modern age, zombies have been nearly erased from the historical narrative by our nationalist, corporate media and are forgotten by the average America.. But of course, like a real zombie, the zombie virus will never really die. The book ends with a dire warning from Miller that we should not forget our zombie history in favor of silly zombie movies and iPhone games, lest we be doomed to repeat it.
Definitely a book for lovers of history and lovers of zombie tales. I'd like to see some sequels, further filling out this fascinating alternate history, the most interesting take on zombies I've seen during this modern zombie literature boom.
