Max Brooks
provides us with a very believable and hauntingly realistic “oral history” of
just how a war with Zombies could ever happen.
It reads as if it was a documentary on BBC or the History Channel, a
very different and interesting way for a novel such as this to be written. World War Z was published in 2006 by The
Crown Publishing Group.
Max Brooks’
alter-ego (he is never named in the novel, and the reader is left to assume it
is Brooks conducting these interviews) travels all across the globe to
interview first-hand survivors after the Zombie War. His journeys take him from the Plains of
America to the Middle East to the Antarctic and everywhere in-between. He interviews war veterans, critical members
of various governments and even your everyday regular bloke that just happened
to get caught in the middle of the most atrocious event to ever happen to
humanity. Brooks interviews men and
women trying to help make a difference in the fight, but he does not
discriminate and even interviews those that took advantage of the fears of
humans to make money during humanity’s most trying times.
This is one
of those books that; we all know is science fiction and would never ever
happen, but the writing is so good and Brooks thought of everything that this
book has you thinking, “Zombies aren’t real…and yet.” The Zombie genre has been around for decades,
with authors and screen-writers all putting their spin on those mindless
brain-eating buggers, but Brooks actually explains how his zombie infestation
would work, and just how such an infestation could go global in a matter of
days. It’s very intriguing. The breakout takes place in a remote village
in China, once the Chinese government gets word of what’s going on, a cover-up
of sorts is in place to keep other countries from really understanding the
dangers. Infected but not yet turned
humans are fleeing the country to escape quarantine, getting smuggled out of
the country by the thousands and therefore bringing the disease to the next
country…and then the next…and so on and so forth. I’ve never once thought that there would be
anyway that The United States would ever be overrun by zombies (if such a thing
existed) because we have too much firepower and so much land to cover, but
Brooks actually made me believe that zombies could infest our country and initially
succeed.
Brooks was
able to really capture all the emotions of everyone he interviewed, and you
could almost feel through his writing that you were there living through all of
this with them. The major themes of this
book had to do with human nature and the irrational emotions that separate
humans from the living dead. The fear
and irrational panic that everyone has at some level created not just a fear of
zombie infestation, but also secondary threats that put the human race at
danger. Unpreparedness and fright caused
humans to turn on humans, governments turning on their citizens and countries
waging war with each other when they should have been coming together to fight
the common enemy. It’s truly an engaging
book about what could happen in a post-apocalyptic earth, no matter if zombies
are the cause or not.
I really
enjoyed this book. My one complaint is
that there were too many interviews and not enough depth or explanation. There are some really great interviews, but
just when they started to get good and pull you in, Brooks stops and goes on to
the next interview. At times it was
frustrating to read about one person’s experience but never hear the whole
story. There were so many characters and
so many stories you could never get focused or engaged enough to truly care
about that specific person’s experience.
I would have preferred less interviews but with more depth and
progression in the stories that Brooks told.
Brooks does try to tie it all together in the end, but by that time the
reader is left trying to remember what person goes with which story and its
importance to the overall book. I get
that all the stories are important to the whole story, and he does put them in
chronologically according to how the zombie war started but it was difficult at
times to focus on the story when you have all these characters and experiences
running around throughout the book.
Overall I
liked this book a lot. Brooks gives us a
plausible and very realistic version of the Zombie Apocalypse. It’s not just the believability that makes
this book so darn good; it’s the human emotion and the resolve of the human
spirit that makes this book worthy of all the praise it has received. I wish the individual stories were better
explained, but overall this book gets and A- from me. It’s very well written, the zombie infestation
is explained brilliantly and the war on the zombies is so in-depth you actually
feel like this is something that really happened and not just a work of
fiction. Any fan of the zombie genre
should read this book, and I believe any zombie fan will find this book as
hauntingly realistic as I did.
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