World War Z – Book Review
February 6, 2008
I hadn’t really given it much thought, until I started reading World War Z, but when you watch your standard Zombie movie, you usually only see the perspective of the main characters in the plot. Sure, there may be a TV in the background which mentions that the whole world is being overrun, but that’s the most you get. If your lucky, maybe the Zombies get the newscaster while you watch.
Max Brooks really put a whole lot of thought into the global repercussions of a Zombie Apocalypse, including how various countries would try to contain the epidemic, as well as the ecological ramifications of the plague.
In the world of the book, a UN representative was sent to various locations around the world, after the epidemic has been contained, and he took accounts of what people experienced. After completing his work, the UN was glad to publish the facts and statistics of what happened, but didn’t want to publish the "human element" of the report. That is how this book came about (in the books fictional world).
The books is arranged into a series of interviews, organized chronologically. This was a really new take on your typical Zombie thriller, and I not only enjoyed reading the book, but I liked how the interviews gave adequate breaking points in the book.
Like any Zombie story, it isn’t something you would want to read to your children. I found some things in the book to be pretty disturbing, but totally believable. The only negative I can think of is that since there are no real main characters that you follow through the book, there wasn’t much of an attachment to any character, and there wasn’t a urgent need to see what happens next.
Overall a really good read, even if just for the interesting story telling style. I say 4 out of 5 stars.
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February 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
This is a good book. The interviews are only a few pages each, so the book is already broken up in to convenient bite-sized chunks to make it easy to read one or two before you go to bed.
Some of the descriptions are rather disturbing, like you said, so this isn’t a good bed time book for everyone.
February 6th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Thanks Art! Since you aren’t really tied up in a story, it is easy to set it down for the night, but the interviews were compelling enough for me that I kept wanting to read it.
I did have one Zombie dream though.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:30 am
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