World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War | Max Brooks | I loved it but it doesn't stop you...

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War | Max Brooks | Good 'historical' book on a Zombie outbreak

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World War Z: An Or...

	World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War Max Brooks Three Rivers Press, 2007 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 441 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I loved it but it doesn't stop you buying Deathday does it!

This is original writing at its best - yes it jumps from one scenario to another without explanation but it does what it says on the tin - And i really liked it - unlike DEATHDAY BY EUGENE BRUCE (No. 23 in the list if you type my name in)which i don't just like I LOVE and you should buy it right now - please - I love you America!

Good 'historical' book on a Zombie outbreak

As others have said, this book is written from the point of view of a reporter interviewing survivors of "World War Z" which was a battle of zombies vs humans. Unlike many/most Zombie movies which focus on a few people trying to survive such an outbreak, this book covers just about every location on earth to some extent in the stories related.

For the most part, the book is well done. The interviews are arranged chronologically so that it creates a coherent narrative of the events. One minor issue I had was that since I read this over the course of a week, I didn't realize that some earlier interviews were broken into multiple sections throughout the book. It would have been nice to have a '... Interview continued with " type of comment to help the reader reconnect with the previous interview.

One other niggle I had is that the various people interviewed didn't really stand out from each other much. One or two had 'memorable' voices, but most of the rest 'sounded' pretty much the same. It's certainly not easy to create separate voices for characters, and when they primarily speak in 'monologoue' I'm sure it's even harder to do.

That said, it's a very good book. It feels as though it's a historical record, and provides enough details in cases to satisfy those who want a touch of the grisly and disturbing, but usually these moments are brief and certainly not horribly graphic most of the time.

Recommended.

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Solid

Let me start by saying that anyone who writes a fiction piece that deals with zombies in a serious way is a champion in my book.

With that said, World War Z was a solid sci-fi piece. I liked the medium he used to tell his story, which was a series of first hand accounts from zombpocolypse survivors. It sort of had the feel and flow of similar (non-fiction though) accounts from people who took part/survived the Vietnam War and World War 2. In that the accounts dealt not only with combating the enemy, but also with the politics/social situations that lead to/resulted from the conflict. I also like the fact that WWZ wasn't American-centric and dealt with other nationalities pretty extensively.

What bugged me about WWZ though is that many of his "interviewies" spoke in a very similar way to one another so that it was hard for me to suspend disbelief that they all weren't written by the same person. Also, and this is a totally subjective thing, I'm just not convinced that "slow-zombies" could produce the type of chaos WWZ describes. I've thought about this long and hard as a zombie fan and I seriously doubt that they could bite enough people to turn 99% of the world into zombies. Now, if the zombie-virus was an airborne thing or if the zombies were fast, now thats a different story!

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