Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Title: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Author: Max Brooks
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Crown
Publish Date: September 12, 2006
Source: Library

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "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 from those apocalyptic years, 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.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War."

My Two Cents:

"World War Z" is not my normal kind of book. While I do like dystopian fiction, I like it to be realistic and believable. Zombies are a little questionable to me but after hearing such good things about this book from some trusted book recommend-ers, I decided to give this book a chance. I love being proven wrong about my book tastes (it stretches my reading life in so many different ways and gets me out of my comfort zone) and this book definitely did that for me!

I really liked this book! The premise is that it's a bunch of interviews with people all over the world after a zombie apocalypse and then a subsequent war. We see the many different fronts of the war and how people are trying to survive when there is still so much that is unknown about the enemy (how did they turn into zombies? what can they do? how do you get rid of them?). I liked the tactic of using interviews with so many different people. It gives you a lot of different perspectives that allow you to see the scope of what is happening in the world.

I really liked the world building in this book. From all of the different perspectives, you get a good picture of what the zombie apocalypse means and what goes into fighting the zombies. World building in dystopian is always really important to me in getting lost in the book and you definitely get that from this book. Overall, I was pleased and surprised by this book and loved that my gamble was successful.