I'm hate-reading it for my book club. It already sucks for a bunch of reasons but it's also nakedly jingoistic in ways I don't even think the author understands because I think he's just a dumb rich kid (his father is Mel Brooks).
It's a zombie apocalypse book. The baseline we're working with is: if a country is a country its policies are good-to-neutral (for example Israel wisely accumulates all evidence of outbreaks and is the first to publish a report to warn the world, then is the only country to quarantine BUT SINCE THEY'RE SO WISE AND GRACIOUS THEY ALSO GRANT RIGHT OF RETURN SO PALESTINIANS CAN QUARANTINE WITH THEM) but any official enemy is disastrous evil (China hides the outbreak from the world, Russia slaughters their own troops to maintain rank, Iran starts a nuclear war). Also doesn't hesitate to slip in liberal conspiracy theories about them - the PLA makes millions selling human organs (extracted from live, unwilling subjects), Iran completes their nuclear program with assistance from DPRK.
I haven't got into the armed forces idolatry like there's so much that sucks about this book but this is the quote that made my eyes bulge out of my head:
Now, I am a good soldier, but I am also a West German. You understand the difference? In the East, they were told that they were not responsible for the atrocities of the Second World War, that as good communists, they were just as much victims of Hitler as anyone else. You understand why the skinheads and proto-fascists were mainly in the East? They did not feel the responsibility of the past, not like we did in the West. We were taught since birth to bear the burden of our grandfathers’ shame. We were taught that, even if we wore a uniform, that our first sworn duty was to our conscience, no matter what the consequences.
Fuck this dumb book how did it receive such universal praise
The book is definitely trash. If the rest of the book wasn't so bad, the West German chapter could be a good example of POV bias (like this is what he believes not true fact), because the East German commander actually kills himself because he can't live with having to abandon civilians to the zombies, subverting everything said about East Germans.
I would be fine if the whole book was Rashomon but the thing is all the points of view always align to reinforce a specific worldview, which is ultimately the worldview of a dumb mericabrain
Yeah but that's just the brilliance of the author adding another meta layer where the person doing these interviews is seeking to reinforce a specific narrative, just like the "journalists" of the real world! (not actually true, but it is kinda funny how you can read it that way)*
*You can't really read it that way because you have to bend the text a lot but the author is a fuck so who cares