I gave my nephew The Zombie Survival Guide for his birthday today. (This is the nephew currently living with us, over whom we have temp guardianship, BTW.) I read the book first, as I always do. Certainly fun in its mock-seriousness.
The end of the book traces zombie sightings throughout history, and of course, Max Brooks ties this in to familiar historical events and figures: Ghenghis Khan, the Crusades, the slave trade, Shaka. It's not Brooks's job to provide balance or correction in a work of humorous fiction, of course. He is riding the wave of popular historical belief, not trying to affect it. But I was struck by how unerringly he hewed to the line of PC history: the evil Crusaders and overreacting Catholics in general, the brutality and stupidity of Europeans out in the world - small, passing references, but always in the same direction.
The reverse myth still holds sway among the semi-educated. They need to show that they no longer believe those 6th-grade history myths, so they go out of their way to show they believe the 13th-grade myths instead.
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