World War Z / the Zombie Survival Guide

by Max Brooks

Paperback, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

PS3602.R6445

Publication

Broadway Books (2013), Edition: Box, 612 pages

Description

Fiction. Horror. Literature. Science Fiction. HTML:#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Prepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies.”—Entertainment Weekly   We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z is the only record of the pandemic.   The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE “Will spook you for real.”—The New York Times Book Review   “Possesses more creativity and zip than entire crates of other new fiction titles. Think Mad Max meets The Hot Zone. . . . It’s Apocalypse Now, pandemic-style. Creepy but fascinating.”—USA Today   “Will grab you as tightly as a dead man’s fist. A.”—Entertainment Weekly, EW Pick    “Probably the most topical and literate scare since Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast . . . This is action-packed social-political satire with a global view.”—Dallas Morning News.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member cleverusername2
Oh. My.

The most horrible thing about World War Z is that after you read it any other zombie apocalypse fiction will have to work that much harder to keep your attention. I read the Zombie Survival guide first, which skewed towards comedy with it's completely deadpan depiction of surviving undead
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plagues. I found it helpful to read this first as it gave me the background on what Brook's zombies can and cannot do.

WWZ is addictively engaging, I read it in two days and wished it would go on another 400 pages or more. It helped that since it was an "oral history" (epistolary novel) which is one of my favorite styles of fiction and the shortness of the "interviews" leads well to just powering though the book. I'll have to reread it soon.

The stories are related with upmost seriousness, which is an interesting twist for a zombie survival horror novel. I love the fact that there is a world-wide perspective of the disaster. Brooks uses the genre of zombie horror fiction to make scathing commentary on aspects of postmodern life, such as the culpability of the media, disastrous inertia of the military when dealing with new "asymmetric" threats, critiques on the governments of the U.S., China, the Russian Federation and others. He also covers the entire world as it is infested by the undead, from the story of a rogue Chinese missile submarine seeking refuge on the ocean floor (only to be deluged with zombies wandering in swarms on the ocean floor) to the brave astronauts on the International Space Station who forgo escape back to Earth so they can keep the communications and surveillance satellites operational. There are scenes of such terribleness but it never delves into hackneyed horror genre cliches, which is most welcome and refreshing for a zombie novel.

I dearly hope that the literary world takes this book as seriously as it deserves.
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LibraryThing member ficke-myers
Surprising and well-written.

This starts to read like a zombie novel and, indeed, if that's what you're looking for it will deliver. However, what you really have here is a gripping story combined with a poignant masterpiece of geopolitical and pop culture commentary. In a retrospective fashion it
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deals with current political issues, as well as pieces of our society that people largely take for granted. When the entire world falls into chaos and war, what does a market analyst (or anyone else) have to offer to the war effort? When the power grid goes down how does a family heat and feed itself in the face of legions of the walking dead? When a nation spans thousands of miles and hundreds of millions of people, what kind of national sacrifice will occur to insure that the nation itself survives? How do you fight a war against an enemy that feels no fear, that needs no sleep, and feels no pain?

There is as much horror in the calculated actions of humanity as there is in the unintelligent shambling of the undead. This is truly a fantastic read; a book that I could not put down, regardless of how much sleep I was going to lose over it.

My only problem with the book comes in the format that lends so much brilliance to it. The entire book is transcribed interviews with people who were involved in the war: doctors, foot soldiers and recruits, generals, astronauts, environmentalists, etc. It means that you get a really fantastic view of the war through many different eyes. It also means that many of the stories told go unfinished. For all I know there is a sequel in the works that will deal with many of the issues that aren't resolved (North Korea comes to mind). The book was so gripping and gave you so few hard facts (again, a source of the horror) that it left me wanting for more story and resolution. However, even with that i wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anybody, even those who might not normally read horror.
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LibraryThing member cestovatela
Set in the not-too-distant future, this is the story of World War III: the war of all humanity against a plague of zombies. I bought this expecting some kind of satire, but this book takes itself completely seriously. That's what makes it so appealing.

Twelve years after the end of the war, a UN
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observer interviews survivors from around the world. Some are high-level government functionaries, some are soldiers, but the majority are ordinary people who went to great lengths to survive. Each of them speak in 3-4 page interviews that we can imagine reading in a magazine or seeing in a PBS documentary. This is what makes the book feel so real.

What's more, author Max Brooks has clearly considered the zombie war from every angle. Generals and soldiers explain the difficulty of fighting an army of fearless, thoughtless creatures with no material desires. Civilians explain how our materialistic, pop culture-obsessed country ignored the problem until it was too late. Everyone chronicles humanity's struggle to survive, including an ill-planned exodus to the frozen north and a disasterous attempt create a refuge in Paris' underground tunnels. Each survivor's story is firmly rooted in the history and socioeconomics of their country. The US is aided by Americans' individualistic spirit but hampered by a 65% white collar work force with few practical skills; Cuba, on the other hand, emerges as an economic superpower thanks to its high concentration of doctors, efficient state bureaucracy and easily defensible island location.

Creativity is one of the characteristics I admire most in a book and that's why I liked World War Z so much. With such a short review, there's no way I could do justice to the book's incredible scope -- and besides, discovering it for yourself is half the fun. It's not science fiction or a thriller or even a horror novel; it feels like a real non-fiction chronicle of a near-apocalyptic event. Even if this doesn't sound like your usual cup of tea, give it a chance.
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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50
Although a work of fiction, World War Z is presented as a non-fiction look at the Zombie War that occurred on Earth approximately 10 years before the book was published. The premise of the author interviewing and documenting eyewitness accounts is very realistic, with footnotes included, as well as
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a brief introduction to each witness so as to verify their testimony. As this pandemic-style horror reanimates the dead, world-wide panic sets in.

I found this a very chilling and all to easy to believe book. The responses of the various governments of earth, along with the military, scientific and business class rang all too true. With the general population kept in the dark and fed lies and evasions, this war was able to escalate into a world wide apocalypse.

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes this book different was also its' one weak spot for me. These fictional interviews eventually start running together and become somewhat similar. I missed having that one person or group of people to really care about and root for. The whole book just became too impersonal and lacked heart.

Nevertheless, it was a fascinating read from an obviously creative author and certainly worth the time I invested, even if it was just for the survival tips in case I ever have to face a real “Zombie War”.
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LibraryThing member the_hag
Wow! I went into reading this book expecting another mediocre reading experience...it seems like nearly every book I've read recently with zombies in it hasn't been all that good and I'd actually been putting off reading World War Z for several months for this very reason...as it turns out, I need
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not have worried, Brooks' book is quite a step up from what I've been reading and I really enjoyed it! I think that Brooks has pulled off something that is difficult for the zombie genre...being a largely visual medium, the world of zombie is sometimes hard to capture adequately in words...Brooks has accomplished this by leaving the Zombies in the background (though there are some very graphic descriptions of zombies and their attacks interspersed throughout the narratives) and using first person narratives to tell the story of an alternative future history...what I like to call a "might be." The author takes the idea...what WOULD happen if the dead started to rise...how would individuals and governments react...who would accept it and prepare, who would deny it to their own detriment...it's an idea that anyone who has watched even one zombie flick has thought about. What would *I* do...how would my neighbors react...people in large cities...would it become global and how would peoples all over the world react. This book covers it all and in a unique way.

In World War Z Brooks has chosen to explore the scope and magnitude of a zombie infection through "interviews" with individuals from all over the globe...every country, every race...from doctors to soldiers to politicians to mercenaries and beyond. This isn't the "everyman's" story; these are interviews with people from the "inside," those in the know and those who are part of the "war machine" from start to finish. What really makes this novel stand out is the individual narratives strung together to form a larger picture of the entire "invasion," instead of choosing one group (or several small groups located in different locations) to focus on, thus NOT personalizing it with a single group or individual and their experience through the "war." Don't get me wrong, the story is still individualized, but in a broader way that gives humanity a face through the key players of the "war." There are definitely places where I wanted to know WAY more...where Brooks could certainly flesh out these stories, making each into an individual novel (a series)...I longed for that in places, but has he done that, I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much...probably what the novel really needed were a few places where the "narrator" filled in some "historical" details to help bring the novel to a more cohesive whole...but really this is a minor quibble.

Overall, World War Z is well written, humorous (Brooks skewers politicians, the military-industrial complex, pop culture, and the "modern" way of life in an equal opportunity fashion) and which gives the reader the best of both worlds...zombies AND human drama! I particularly liked how the interviews wove together a picture of each country the world over...each with its own strengths and weaknesses (some were geographically advantaged or disadvantaged, for others it was culturally or politically) and how those strengths and weaknesses played out across the globe. I give World War Z five stars...it certainly takes from Romero and others...but it definitely has its own message and is well worth reading, I'd recommend it to fans of the zombie genre wholeheartedly...but I think it also had appeal outside of the horror/zombie fan base...while it does have zombies and is graphic in places, this is really a human story...a drama told in individual interviews that really reached out to the reader, there were a few places where I got a little misty eyed, or outraged, and yes grossed out. Well done and very hard to put down!
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LibraryThing member PhoenixTerran
Initially, I wasn't planning on reading World War Z. I had read Max Brook's first book The Zombie Survival Guide, and although it made for a good read, it didn't inspire me to rush out and pick up his next book. But then some friends of mine started singing the praises of World War Z and I've
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frequently seen it referred to positively ever since. (Like most books, there are dissenters as well.) Recently, there seems to have been a rash of zombie themed books and movies released. Though I'm open to reading the genre, I'm not what you would call a fan. From what I can tell, most people agree that World War Z stands out among the rest. This resurgence of the interest in zombies intrigues me.

The outbreak started in a small village in China that had no official name. The boy was only twelve years old. People he came into contact with after he was bitten by an unknown creature while diving fell ill and died, only to revive and exhibit violent behavior and thereby spreading the infection even further. Soon, it became a global epidemic, a virtually unstoppable flood. How quickly civilization collapses and how high the cost of survival is revealed through the lives of those who lived through that dark time in human history.

World War Z collects the oral histories of over forty of the survivors of the Zombie War. While not all directly related to one another, together they form a coherent and terrifying mosaic of the disaster that befell humankind, the lengths people went to to survive, and how the rebuilding is only beginning. Each individual has a distinct voice and perspective of the events that took place. Brooks has done a magnificent job in the selection and compilation of these interviews. However, the last section, "Good-byes," is somewhat confusing as he chose to include short snippets from many of the people previously introduced, and it is difficult to remember exactly who is who.

I will admit, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with how good World War Z turned out to be--for me at least, it actually live up to the hype surrounding it. I also appreciated the cameo appearances of Brooks previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide. Even though World War Z is technically about zombies, I feel the book is even more about the human response to a global catastrophe (which just happens to be zombies in this case). The book is truly creepy, but I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to people who ordinarily avoid horror stories, though I imagine some still might not be able to get past the zombie element in order to take it seriously. But it is really so much more than a zombie story, and really speaks to global politics and human nature. I'm definitely glad I made time to read World War Z and won't be surprised if I pick it up again in the future; I found it that compelling and morbidly fascinating.

Experiments in Reading
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LibraryThing member k.rose
If you like zombie stories then this is for you. By making this book a collection of stories from the survivors of the war starting from the fist contact with patient Zero to the last day of the war, it makes this book full of action without having to make the book too detailed. The stories are
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exciting, sad, and down right creepy. Great on audio book as well!
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LibraryThing member raistlinsshadow
True to its full title, World War Z is indeed written as a transcribed oral history, complete with bracketed notations signifying laughter or pauses in the interview and footnotes added for clarification. Not including the introduction and acknowledgements, the book is divided into eight sections,
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each section further divided into varying numbers of interviews. Only in the last section, “Goodbyes”, do certain people’s interviews get an additional section, most notably a fallen squadron commander and a person taking up residence in Denver, Colorado. Each interview is briefly prefaced by the author, stating the location of the interview and bits about each person’s personality and/or background.

I found the writing to be particularly commendable in this book mainly because while the characters, as they were, did tend to run together, Brooks managed to make each of them fairly distinct, or at the very least give them different situations that they encountered in the fictitious World War Z. Some that are more unique than others will naturally stand out—once again, my personal favorite is the story of the squadron commander—but from person to person, he gives them different voices and different mannerisms while being interviewed.

At the beginning of this book when I realized how it was set up, I was very aware that it might become a problem later to differentiate between characters giving the interviews, but since their stories are related only through the experience of World War Z and only two people in interviews one right after the other have expressed any previous knowledge of the other, it was hardly a problem. In general, the stories that seemed to be either the most spectacular or are first-hand accounts (or both, as the case may be) were given a second interview in the final section to provide some sort of closure at the book’s conclusion.

Brooks seems to struggle with giving the characters some sense of individuality at the start of the book, but once the plot gets going and what’s going on in World War Z takes shape, he seems to have a far easier time with giving each person their own voice. The writing is realistic and easy to follow once the plot gets going, though at the beginning when the reader presumably has no idea what World War Z entails, it’s a little difficult to get into.

The book is good enough so that music that doesn't distract too much from it is good to go along with reading it. [Good thing, eh?] One thing that I also particularly like about it is that since zombie fiction is generally out of my realm of reading, it was a good, er, introduction to things like that. It's the kind of book where I picked it up and said, "OH! I should for sure read more of this, because this is really cool."
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LibraryThing member edgeworth
As I mentioned a little while ago, I have an understandable aversion to zombie fiction of any kind these days, in the same way that a man living in a glorious palace of chocolate might long for a piece of celery. It's also partly due to the fact that so much zombie fiction is stale and repetitive,
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featuring plucky survivors holed up in a farmhouse with no idea of what's going on in the outside world.

World War Z, by renowned zombie expert Max Brooks (author of 2004's Zombie Survival Guide), takes a completely different stab at things. It's a comprehensive "oral history" examining the global effects of a mass zombie pandemic, interviewing subjects from all over the world who were involved in different areas of the conflict. There's everyone from a Brazilian black market surgeon who sees one of the first cases, to an American schoolgirl who flees into the Canadian north with her family, to a greedy pharmaceutical executive who exploits the panic to create a lucrative placebo.

The entire book is comprised of fictional post-war interviews, and the beauty of this approach is that it allows both a global examination, and the single-person survival narrative that the genre is founded on. We see inside the head of everyone from the Vice-President of the United States to a wretched feral child who was forced to grow up in the wild. Many of these form quite fascinating stand-alone stories, notably the US Air Force pilot who survives a plane crash and must make her way to an evacuation point through the Lousiana swamps, aided by a voice on her radio that may just be her imagination; and the Chinese submarine commander who deserts with his crew and sets off on a journey through the Waterworld-esque oceans, bartering with refugee ships, examining zombie-infested coastlines and trying to stay ahead of hunter-killer subs from the Chinese navy.

Like the best zombie fiction, this book is a parable. Just as Dawn of the Dead criticises American commercialism and consumption, World War Z attacks bureaucratic incompetence, human greed and the insular, self-absorbed nature of the American people. Brooks strays away from mentioning any specific people or events, in order to keep the book timeless; for example, the Iraq War is referred to as "the last brushfire war." One of the most interesting things I found here was his prediction that we won't lose in Iraq, but that it will be perceived as a loss, because it has taken so much time and money and lives - that it wasn't a knock-out blow like Americans want and expect.

There are a few criticisms I'll level at the book. While Brooks paints the characters quite well, they occasionally seem to be the wrong character: for example, the slick, corrupt pharmaceutical executive who escaped to a stronghold in Antarctica after making billions on a false miracle cure spoke like a Brooklyn street punk. Some of the characters (especially non-Americans) are quite often stereotypes, such as the befuddled English fop who loves his queen, the California diver who thinks whales are awesome, or the double whammy for the Japanese: an otaku geek with no social skills and a wise, honourable sensei steeped in tradition and skilled with the blade. Despite being far more globally aware than I'd expect from an American author, the book is still quite US-centric, and I was a little disappointed that Australia didn't get much of a look-in. There is a single Australian character, for the record, whose narrative is the last one you'd expect: as commander of the International Space Station. He's as intelligent, articulated and wise as you'd expect such a man to be, though Brooks couldn't resist throwing in at the end: "Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner." Sigh.

On the whole, however, this is still a great book. It's well-crafted enough to appeal to those who wouldn't normally read fiction of this type, with the benefit of a few allegorical moral messages in there as well. It's breaths of fresh air like this that the genre desperarely needs.
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LibraryThing member Toast.x2
NOW, for a book i really enjoyed.
World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war

Max brooks, author of the Zombie Survival Guide (2003), nailed this book down with the fervor of an angry UK chimp beating a kitten to death. this book was emotional and in some parts, difficult to read with your mouth
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closed. the level of graphic descriptions varies depending on the section you are reading. it is as stated, an oral history, stories told by those who experienced the horror.

The book opens with an author note advising the background on the book. in this world, the author worked for a world organization, and after the “war” was over was asked to tour affected areas (globally in essence) and collect data on the human population impact. all of the stories were then included in an all point status report, where the human element of each story was “black lined” down to just the bare statistics.

the report’s author felt that the stories themselves only mattered when the human element was kept in tact, and got governmental go ahead to write a documentary book with all the omitted details.

this is the culmination of that work. stories from around the world. stories of hope, sadness, death, decay, glory, and cynical humor. as each story is presented as interview form, the first person accounts carry more weight and feel more realistic. as the book chronicles the war from beginning to end,you are left with more than just a collection of short stories, instead, a full fledged recollection detailing the experiences of humans faced with one of the largest survival issues ever encountered.

i would recommend this book highly to anyone who enjoys humanitarian documentaries and horror stories.

--
xpost RawBlurb.com
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LibraryThing member Milda-TX
I had heard this was a good book but I figured - eh, probably just goofy talk from people who like vampires and such. But then my sister recommended it to me, so I had to try it. Well, I loved it. Loved the writing. Enjoyed the way it was set up as interviews with 'survivors'. Appreciated the
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wartime/survival strategy, and the heartbreaking stories. Didn't so much like all the zombie-splatter talk, but heck, it's just a story, I can handle a little pretend guts and gore.
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LibraryThing member Aerrin99
I really enjoyed this book a lot - a surprising amount, as a friend had told me the format really didn't work for her.

I personally found the format - a series of short interviews from around the world, from all different sorts of people who survived the zombie war in different fashions -
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fascinating and well done.

In particular, I was fascinated by the way in which Brooks clearly spent a lot of time and research and thought into considering how different parts of the world, different cultures and peoples, might react to this threat. What do you do when your enemy does not need to sleep or eat or breathe? When they are your brothers and sisters? When everyone one of you they kill becomes one of them?

What makes this stand out from other zombie fiction - I've not read any, but seen lots of movies! - is that it looks hard at the long haul. Not just those few frantic first hours, days, months, but years and years. People who survive the zombies have a whole host of other things to worry about. The nuclear weapons of their frantic neighbors frying the earth. The lack of food and clean water inside their strongholds. Sickness, disease, animals gone wild and rabid, cold, bad water. Things that we don't even begin to think about.

I particularly loved a few touches that made his world seem incredibly real. Nicknames for the zombies - Zack and Zed Head and G - flowed easy and felt natural in the interviews. We spoke to politicians and doctors and soldiers and civilians, dog handlers and astronauts stranded on the space station who kept the satellites alive.

The sheer /scope/ of this work is impressive, and a joy to read. It's one of those crazy science fiction works that ends up making you think about a lot more than just zombies by the time you're done.
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LibraryThing member timdt
World War Z gives you Max Brook's version of what you don't get from most of the post apocalyptic zombie novels: a global combination of political, geographical and culteral views of how our world experienced the outbreak of zombies through a collection interviews. Many of the interviews read like
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short stories you may find in an anthology and are very good. A few of those come to mind concerning a young Japanese man escaping from his apartment complex, a female pilot transporting supplies across North America and a group of Chinese escaping their land in a submarine. Others come across as dry. I plowed through the first half fascinated, but then bogged down before the book would pick back up. Any momentum by a series of these interviews would be halted by a subsequent series of interviews that shifted the viewpoint. The whole affect is interesting but ultimately not as satsifying as I had hoped.
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LibraryThing member KC9333
This is an amazing book - one I could not put down. The story is told by a government analyst struggling to make sense of the horrific events that shake the world. He interviews people across the globe and documents their experiences. The story touches on military strategies, commercial responses,
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and basic human endurance. These "interviews" range from touching to horrifying and in the back of your mind you know the situations could very well be real - just replace zombies with ebola virus or anthrax... This is a book that warrants several readings.
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LibraryThing member joannasephine
Forget that this is about Zombies. Forget that it's promoted as a collection of war stories. Forget all that. This book is a very interesting examination of human societies, and how we define ourselves, both as people (as in "living human beings") and as peoples (as in "Australians", or
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"Christians, or "Idiots").

Super-brief synopsis: the book purports to be a series of interviews with people who survived the Zombie War, from many different nations, professions and levels of society, and presented in semi-chronological order. Think of it as the transcripts of an in-depth documentary, made some ten years after the events in question.

As a device, the faux-interviews do work. Brooks gets enough differentiation between most of the characters so that you do feel that you're listening to different people. (Not always, but most of the time, which is fairly decent ventriloquism). It is hard to keep track of who the different people are -- not all characters recur, so it takes a while before you realise that you're listening to a continuation of a story that you've encountered earlier.

While the book does have plenty of gore, plenty of reanimated corpses shuffling around and lots of bits of weaponry being deployed with greater or lesser success, the real point of the book has nothing to do with Zombies. It's about how humans cope in times of crisis, and what we are willing to do to and for each other in order to survive. And the interview structure means that multiple scenarios can be explored. Military crack-down? Check. Stockholm syndrome? Check. Isolationism? Check. Nuclear detonations? Check. Canabalism? Decimation? Feral animals? Check, check, check. The actual physical mechanics of best attacking a force of creatures that don't stop coming until their brains have been destroyed individually, and whose numbers now exceed those of the living? Ooh yes. Check. Capitalism, Communism, Religion ... he gives plenty of philosophies, stragegies, approaches and possibilities an outing.

Where the book falls down, as other reviewers have noted, is that it ultimately resorts to cliche. But not just any cliche: American cliche. Nations behave in a way that American television, film and media typically protray them, and which doesn't necessarily accord with how they are viewed by the rest of the world. So the Chinese crack down, try to contain, then deny anything's happening. The Russians and Ukrainians are brutal. The Japanese first wait to be told what to do, then organise. Oh, and an American president is the one who finally galvanises the world into Finally Fighting Back. (No Cliche Left Behind!) I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that the token Aussie was an astronaut, and that the one reference to New Zealand was to five hundred Maori holding off "half of re-animated Auckland" (so he has visited then).

It's things like this that mean the book will never quite be taken as seriously as, for example, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". It's much easier reading, and is unashamedly mid-to-low brow. Add that to the fashion for all things Zombie, and it's no wonder it sells so well. But there is some real food for thought in between those garish covers, and it's a book hat I suspect I will return to. If it does nothing else, it will make you ask yourself a few questions. What, exactly, would you do, in order to survive? And who will you take your orders from?
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LibraryThing member GingerbreadMan
This is so clever my head spins. I love how Brooks constructs this. Eye witness accounts tell the story of the great world war against the undead, from the first recorded case all the way up until the victory (or proclaimed victory at least). There’s no arc per se, no extensive overviews, no
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background information. But the stories form jigsaw puzzle pieces that gives a surprisingly good sense of the lapse and impact of this human blight. You really feel you’re getting an idea of the chain of events, and that they are utterly believable. This is not least impressive because the book is truly global in scope, telling of the war from Japan to Chile, from India to Ukraine. On top of that, the short descriptions of where the interviews are made that start each chapter, give enough of an idea of what the world looks like now, after World War Z, to tickle the imagination even further.
There are so many great stories, perspectives and flashes here that it feels hard to pick favorites. But a few passages that will stick with me for a long time are the chapter about propaganda filming for the American home front, the old-new role of castles and fortresses in World War Z, the micro states forming in Polynesia, the disastrous escape to cold climate undertaken by many American civilians, and the account of the battle of Hope, where the stripped down American army put their tailor-made tactics to the test for the first time. This is a remarkable book, creating a world that is very believable and deeply scary. It’s indeed apocalyptic, but there are streaks of utopia in here too. Because in all it’s gloom and horror, this is also a book about community, about courage, cooperation and people’s ability to prevail.
But sadly, Brooks does fall into a few traps. There is a bit of national stereotyping going on – the Chinese are evil, the Russians stagger under their slave mentality, and gosh, those Brits really do love the queen. And there’s also a little too much of Independence Day style America-centrism for my taste, given the global perspective in this book. I could quite frankly have done without the Cuban conceding “The Norteamericanos taught us the meaning of the word freedom” (even if I love how Brooks dares to make Cuba the strongest economy in the world in during the war), or the President’s tough decision making in the UN. But in this rich tapestry, these remain minor flaws in a book that is surprisingly wide in scope and extremely well-conceived.
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LibraryThing member ladyhazmat314
Before we get started, yes. Max Brooks is the son of one of the greatest comedic actor/directors of all time Mel Brooks. But don't let that fool you. There is nothing funny about WWZ.

This is not one of your typical beginning-middle-end type novels. It does not follow the harrowing trials of a band
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of lone survivors fighting their way through a world overrun with zombies. Instead it takes a different approach, chronicling the events of the zombie war from the start of the plague, to the rising panic, counterattack and finally post-war reconstruction, through the eyes of a number of survivors. It is written as a non-fiction account compiled from a series of interviews conducted by "the author."

There were several good take-home messages from this piece:

1. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

No. There are no zombie sharks (although I don't think that a zombie shark would be any more terrifying than a regular shark if I were forced to face one in combat. A zombie land shark on the other hand, that's a totally different story). However, you might think a tropical island in the middle of the ocean is safe, but you would be wrong. Zombies (aka Zack, aka Zed-Heads) are dead, remember? They don't drown. All they do is sink to the bottom of the ocean and walk their way back to land. A prospect that I had not considered before reading this book. It's something to take into account when you've landed your sailboat on a little zombie-free piece of heaven and decide to go sun bathing or skinny dipping without a weapon handy. There is nothing quite like a waterlogged, decaying corpse shuffling or crawling its way out of the surf to ruin a day at the beach.

2. Home is where the Hermit is...

If you manage to find and/or build yourself a zombie-proof dwelling - for the love of (insert something that you can't live without here) don't advertise! If you think that the Zed-Heads are the only things you have to worry about in the midst of a zombie uprising, think again. The living can be just as dangerous if not more so than the living dead. The only potential upside to being killed by a breathing neighbor is that you might actually stay dead...

3. Supersize me!

Contrary to popular belief, bigger is not always better. One of the best and, in my opinion, prophetic moments in the book details a fantastic display of hubris befitting the US military. Over-confident in a battle plan that might best be described as "Operation Cannot Possibly Fail" - The Battle of Yonkers becomes an infamous failure of epic proportions. Living Dead 1: Humanity 0. I won't ruin it by going into detail, but let me say (and I will almost certainly be reprimanded for the following comment) just because you have giant explosives doesn't mean you should use them...

Overall I thought this was an excellent read. The first-person accounts of individual encounters with "Z" made the zombie apocalypse feel more real than any other work I have come across. Rumor has it that a WWZ movie is in production and set to be released sometime next year.
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LibraryThing member welkinscheek
Wonderfully gory and frightening. Like 28 Days Later expanded in grusome, realistic detail. How would our world governments handle a zombie pandemic? Max Brooks seems to know.
LibraryThing member Guide2
An amazing book: who ever thought of using zombies to do a social critique of the modern world. Every single small section is enjoyable on its own. That makes the whole book an amazing story. You know what's going to happen, but its the details that make so interesting. Lost a lot of sleep with
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this one: not because of the zombies, but because of the richness of the story. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member MaxwellCharest
World War Z by Max Brooks is yet another one of the amazing zombie themed non-fiction horror novels he has written. It includes graphic first person accounts, daring decisions, and it shows how bad ignorance can be to the human race having our race almost be completely wiped out by zombies. I for
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one thought this was a decent book. This book could best be compared to others he has written such as Zombie world I would also compare parts of it to that of a movie like brave heart.

The book begins with how outbreaks of the disease were happening but the government was trying to cover them up so nobody knew what was truly going on, Then the book turns to an event called the great panic this is where the outbreak turns into an epidemic and all over the world people are quickly figuring out what is really going on, but with the majority of governments on the earth trying to just contain the disease and not worry about fighting it, this makes it spread even quicker at one point more than three hundred-million known zombies in the world. Civilians then have to take it into their own hands to fight of the zombie threat and other threats such as quislers (humans who have so little contact or have been separated from other humans for so long that they think they are zombies and openly attack other people).

To rate this I would have to give it a ten out of ten I really thought this was a fantastic and interesting book I would totally recommend this book to anyone interested in adventure, horror, and warfare. This is another Max Brooks master piece. This guides you through only using first person accounts.
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LibraryThing member bookwormteri
I was looking for a fun read about zombies and read this. Very well done, but very military. Almost reads like accounts from WWII, that being said, it is very realistic and you almost believe that this happened or could happen. Too military for my taste, but overall fascinating.
LibraryThing member Tpoi
The best zombie book I ever read! (Ok the only one) Clever, analytical, ironic, gruesome, even reflective. His take on zombie infestation vis-a-vis psychology, economy, ecology, social organization, military, culture, etc. is really enjoyable to read. Laid out in the form of United Nations 'after
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reports', a pastiche of hundreds of perspectives on the war that almost killed humanity.
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LibraryThing member jbdavis
This is a very clever premise that provides much food for thought about how individuals and governments respond to unexpected emergencies ... or fail to respond. In this "future history" a reporter travels the world to interview key individuals who fought in the zombie wars after a virus surfaces
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that sweeps over populations in an epidemic, leaving huge numbers of zombies roaming the earth. Brooks uses this vehicle not only to tell an excellent story but to skewer both governmental policies and lambast the powerful who take advantage of any situation for their own gain. This is a real page turner that resulted in many late nights as I watched civilization collapse and wondered what was found that allowed victory over the zombie hordes.
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LibraryThing member SFCC
An oral history in the style of a post-apocalyptic Studs Terkel, World War Z weaves a variety of perspectives into a complex commentary on contemporary America. I'm keeping my expectations for the upcoming movie low, at least in terms of capturing what Brooks is doing in this novel. Heather Keast
LibraryThing member riaanw
Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is most intriguing. George A Romero's all-devouring movie zombies never seemed to do much more than terrify a handful of Americans; here, the zombie plague had spread around the world with devastating effect, only halted by a rather
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extreme plan, and the novel is presented as a series of journalistic "interviews" with survivors in very different circumstances all around the globe.

South Africa plays a central role (ever imagined a zombie rampage through Khayelitsha?) with a surprising twist as these survivors tell graphic and nuanced tales of political turmoil and intrigue, nuclear mishaps, human suffering and much more during the war against the zombies. Brooks manages to turn clichéd horror into a well-researched study of the likely effects of such an unlikely event on the world's nations (too bad about the several typos that slipped past the book editors).
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2006-09-12
2006

Physical description

612 p.; 8.15 inches

ISBN

0804137889 / 9780804137881

Local notes

Signed
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