This post first published June 17, 2012.
Author: Max Brooks
First Published: September 2006
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
420 pages (mass market paperback)
The Walking Dead television show is really the only
zombie-related story I’ve ever been exposed to. I really love that show
(even if all the main characters annoy me), so I was pretty happy to
receive World War Z as a birthday gift some months ago. I knew nothing about this book and I expected something similar to The Walking Dead; you know, a survival story during a time where zombies have taken over everything. And to some extent, of course World War Z is a survival story, but it is also very different. Where The Walking Dead is the survival story of a select group of (annoying, haha) people, World War Z
is the survival story of the entire Earth, all of humanity. I loved it!
It was different from what I expected, but I thoroughly enjoyed this
different perspective of a zombie war. It had an epic and eerily
realistic feel to it. Like, “Geez, if zombies (or any similar
international problem) really did happen, the whole world could become so desperate.”
Basically, World War Z is a collection of interviews from
various people all over the globe, gathered after the zombie war. There
is a bit of an order to the interviews — you find out about the first
zombie cases, how countries reacted (“The dead are coming back to life?
Hahaha, you got to be kidding.”), how things escalated around the world,
the wars that were fought, and finally, how humans started to slowly,
piece by piece, put their lives back in order. It’s not your “standard
novel”, it doesn’t really have any main characters and there isn’t a
traditional plot.
One thing that has bugged me a bit about The Walking Dead
(sorry, I keep bringing up the show, but like I said, it’s the only
other zombie related story I know) was how I didn’t understand how the
governments of the world simply disappeared. It never seemed plausible
that a zombie outbreak could destroy all semblance of government to the
point that it’s every man for himself. World War Z felt more
realistic to me because all the governments were still in existence,
though in varying degrees of success. The book can get very political
and often times, I was bogged down with military jargon, but I really
loved the explanations of how this government tried
to quarantine themselves from the world, and that government tried to
evacuate all its people, and yet another government screwed up big time
and the entire country was pretty much doomed … stuff like that. This
book takes the idea of a zombie war away from the individual level, and
blows it up on the world stage.
That’s not to say there are no individual stories in this
book; there are, and they are every bit as haunting as the more global
stories. However, the overall impact of this book, at least what I got
from it, was how the entire world as a group was going to tackle the
problem. Some countries allied themselves with others, other countries
tried to figure it out for themselves, etc. I really loved that whole
international thing going on in this book.
Towards the end of the book, I did have a bit of trouble paying
attention. There is no formal plot structure, so after about 300 pages, I
was feeling a little tired of the military stuff the interviewees were
talking about. The advantage of individual stories (and the reason, I
suspect, many zombie stories remain on that level) is that it is easier
to relate to. So after 300 pages, I was getting a tad tired of reading
about military programs, tactics, campaigns, reports and the like.
Still, I really, really enjoyed this book. I suspect that, because of
its format and content, it will not be up to everyone’s tastes (I
hesitate to stereotype, but I feel that many girls won’t enjoy it as
much as guys would — though, I am a girl myself …). I do recommend it
though, and I’m glad my friend introduced me to this.
My Rating: 4/5
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