Book Review: The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Paperback Writer here.

I saw this book while browsing through the shelves of Joseph-Beth Books over at the South Side Works. I didn't pick it up because one, it's in hard back and two, I can just pick it up from the library. I'm thinking about going back and getting it to add to the library at Douglas Manor.

I mean, come on. Look at the cover of the book! Isn't that neat? I should be so luck as to figure out how to do something like that without Photoshop.

Anway, the book starts off with a quote from James Loewen from Lies My Teacher Told Me, which goes:

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to min, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many...can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

Beautiful quote, I think.

Anyway, the book is actually about the city of the dead and about a stranded woman named Laura Byrd. The two only seem separate from each other functioning independent, until an unnamed virus is released into the living world and annihilates almost everyone in the world. The dead then end up in the city while Laura, stuck in a living limbo, tries desperately to survive.

The book is set in the present day and alludes to several current events. Laura is a scientist for Coca-Cola sent to Antartica to study the icecaps. When the virus is released, she and her two fellow scientists are relatively safe, until they cannot make contact with the outside world.

In the city of the dead, which remains unnamed and is just called "The City," has one lone newspaper run by a man named Luka. He eventually meets a blind man and a woman named Minny. Together they try to solve the mystery of the city and more importantly of the "heartbeat."

The book deals with questions of what happens in the afterlife? Is there an afterlife? It also deals with the issue of not to take your life or loved ones for granted because everything can change very dramatically.

So, go ahead. Pick it up. It's an easy read; barely 250 pages.