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mikezad 's review for:
The Serpent and the Rainbow
by Wade Davis
This was quite an interesting read. I really enjoyed how Davis used the initial esoteric draw of vodoun religion in Haiti to introduce me to a wider exploration of Haitian history and culture. I found the sections around the Haitian revolution and the connection of Haitian cultural practices to Guinee to be very informative. I'd be interested in reading something similar around how African cultural practices permeated in black American slave culture.
A few of the chapters around the actual zombi poison and the biological implications went a bit over my head, but overall I was able to follow Davis' journey quite clearly. At the start of the book Davis introduced Zombism and voodoo practices as things that were esoteric and had implications with the occult. However at the end it became clear to me as a reader that zombism was rather something that had deep roots in Haitian culture and society and was connected to a web of cultural practices within the vodoun religion.
On another note it's interesting to note the connection between similar classical "monsters" for lack of a better term. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula are both classic horror figures that have been bastardised to some extent by pop culture, and Haitian zombis are no different. The classic zombie archetype, say in Night of the Living Dead, holds very little connection to the original Haitian concept of a zombi.
Overall a good read and I found another book by Wade Davis recently that I'll be reading soon.
A few of the chapters around the actual zombi poison and the biological implications went a bit over my head, but overall I was able to follow Davis' journey quite clearly. At the start of the book Davis introduced Zombism and voodoo practices as things that were esoteric and had implications with the occult. However at the end it became clear to me as a reader that zombism was rather something that had deep roots in Haitian culture and society and was connected to a web of cultural practices within the vodoun religion.
On another note it's interesting to note the connection between similar classical "monsters" for lack of a better term. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula are both classic horror figures that have been bastardised to some extent by pop culture, and Haitian zombis are no different. The classic zombie archetype, say in Night of the Living Dead, holds very little connection to the original Haitian concept of a zombi.
Overall a good read and I found another book by Wade Davis recently that I'll be reading soon.