Plight of the Living Dead: What the Animal Kingdom's Real-Life Zombies Reveal about Nature -- And Ourselves

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. "Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it." --Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Soonish Zombification isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening all around us, from wasps and crickets to dogs and moose--and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre science of real-life mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab littered with the corpses of zombie ants, 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. A madcap, brain-bending journey into an exhilarating new frontier of neuroscience, Plight of the Living Dead shows us that nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the horrific zombies that evolution has produced time and time again Zombieism isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening in the word around us, from wasps and worms, to dogs and moose - and even humans. In The 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 **A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature--and ourselves**__The Walking Dead____Plight of the Living Dead____Plight of the Living Dead__**"Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it." --Kelly Weinersmith, __New York Times__ bestselling coauthor of __Soonish__** In its teachings, practices, and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms is centrally concerned with death and the dead. This title offers a comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet, and Burma. It contains essays that represent a range of methods