World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
“The end was near.” –Voices from the Zombie War

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.

Most of all, the audiobook captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the listener, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

Customer Reviews: Read 466 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

What an amazing book! September 14, 2006
160 out of 187 found this review helpful

Like several other reviewers, I read and enjoyed Max Brooks' 'Zombie Survival Guide', but I was skeptical as to whether he could strike gold twice in a row. Much to my satisfaction, the answer was yes.

World War Z isn't so much a novel as it is a collection of very personal recollections of people who have lived through - literally - hell on earth. In a way, it reminded me of news footage of these walls you see where, during a civil war, or natural disaster, people go and leave notes for loved ones, hoping someone, anyone, will see them. Every time I see something like that, it strikes me as hopeless and desperate, but at the same time noble and uplifting. In short, what makes us human. This book gave me the same reaction. I preordered it from Amazon, received it this morning, and finished it about an hour ago. I wish I'd rationed it out a bit, because I didn't want that feeling to end - the feeling of reading the accounts of some of the bravest souls who (n)ever walked the earth.

The only other book I've read that comes close to this in 'feel' is Warday, by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. But even that is too one-sided; the authors' own opinions and views are clearly dominant. In World War Z, each individual vignette is unique and special; from Tibetan smugglers to dirigible pilots to ex-politicians, each 'interview' has its own distinct voice.

In closing, I'd just like to say that while George Romero may be the father of the 'zombie genre', Max Brooks may well exceed him. Blasphemy? Nope. Just my opinion. One that is hopefully shared by millions of others.

PS: Here's hoping they don't butcher it when they make the movie! :D

5 out of 5 stars

Like a good Romero zombie movie, but better! January 16, 2007
83 out of 96 found this review helpful

*** SPOILERS BELOW!!! ***

If you love zombie lit but are getting bored with viscera and nihilism, this is a great antidote. Brooks has taken his ironically deadpan "Zombie Survival Guide" and made a whole world out of it. Pretending to be an oral history of humanity's struggle against Romero style zombie hordes, this book has a cast of dozens, most of whom speak for only a few pages before yielding to other voices. As a result, we get a truly international view of the great crisis, and the situation and responses faced by people in a variety of settings.

Generally, this works and works well. Zombie fans will be delighted by the variety and unique sets of questions Brooks addresses - what would an armored company do to fight zombies? What happens to zombies in cold weather? What would happen in Korea and Cuba? Traditionalists will be happy at the slow mindless zombies, but they may perhaps miss all the visceral gore common to the genre, as Brooks does not get too messy. This is a fine choice, as if you want messy there are many, many zombie novels available that are based on anatomy texts, but few that manage to be this creative and panoramic.

Some have commented on Brooks' "leftist" politics. This complaint to me is a non-issue. Some US characters do state that disillusionment over Iraq left the US civilians and military incapable and sluggish to respond to the initial zombie plague, but this is not harped upon and the US military and populace do indeed bounce back soon enough. He also does have an Israel / Palestine solution result from the plague, but we see only very little of the end result, and the rockiness of the path towards a two nation solution is portrayed clearly (complete with an Israeli civil war). Brooks also has a clear Howard Dean stand-in become US President, but unless you are a Dittohead, this will probably be only a minor irritant.

More seriously, Brooks has been accused of an anti-military viewpoint and some Amazon reviewers accuse him of only showing "politically correct" characters in a heroic light, with white male soldiers and other authority figures being shown as inept or malevolent. This is an utter calumny, and some of the only narrators with multiple speaking roles are white male US Army soldiers. The Army's initial response was bumbled as shown, but the reasons for the tactical and strategic failures are clear and realistic and the military soon comes up with effective new strategies, which the soldiers heroically and intelligently implement. Many of the most heroic protagonists in these pages are soldiers of different nations, and the hard choices, psychological and physical suffering, and heroism of these characters comes through clearly and fairly.

The occasional statements about right wing militias seizing control of parts of the US and then not freely handing them back to the government are minor plot points and again are not inconceivable. Left wing citizens do not have the firepower or fortified compounds that some extreme right wing folks have, and the same guys that have bunkers and assault rifles stockpiled also are not very friendly to Big Government. Hardly an unrealistic scenario! And along the same lines, Brooks' solution to the zombie plague is very Big Government with centralized micro-management of resources, citizens, and strategy. This strikes me as again being not overly ideological, and also logical and realistic as many real world crises of large scale and complexity (especially in the 20th Century) were solved in the same way.

Finally to address another review complaint, the UN does take over the eventual wrap-up campaign against the zombies, but this is only after most nations have cleared their countries using their own troops under national sovereign command. The UN is only conducting campaigns in those parts of the world that have been too devastated to conduct their own campaigns or are too isolated or large for nation state operations. Again, not leftist so much as it is pragmatic and realistic.

Sorry to go into the "politics" of zombie wars so much here, but the unifying theme of most criticism of Brooks is that he is too left-wing. As I hope I've shown, I disagree with that assessment and most importantly these politics such as they are have no main bearing on the plot of quality of the book.

Finally, the best things about "World War Z" to me are the quality writing, the surprises of the plot and scenarios, and also the poignancy of the emotional impact. As stated above, the experiences of the combat soldiers are deep and moving, and other sections like the struggle of a pilot trapped behind "enemy lines" and best of all, the K-9 handler's tale are brilliantly done and add both pathos and innovation to portrayal of human experience during the Zombie Plague.

The only poorly done section of the book struck me as the Japan part, with a computer nerd hero who is literally glued to his PC until zombies break down the door. He fumbles his way to escape, discovers a katana, and becomes a samurai ginsu machine, slicing and dicing his way through undead hordes. Finally he meets a wise old sensei who also happens to be blind and an impressive master of zombie fu in his own right. The wise old guy helps the ex-nerd become a warrior monk and the two found an order of swordsmen to save Nippon... Other than a guest appearance by Godzilla and / or giant robots, there is little that could be added to this section to make it seem more cartoonish and cliched, perhaps a sign that Mr. Brooks is capable of wedging his tongue a bit too firmly into his cheek, to the point where his story-telling is impaired. But this is maybe 10 pages out of 400, and the good stuff far outweighs the bad.

All in all, I think this book is brilliant and highly recommend it. The innovation of Brooks's plotting is pared to an optimistic pragmatism that stands in stark contrast to the bleak nihilism of most zombie books. Human society and its components, humans, are ultimately shown to be resilient, intelligent, and even noble. The usual zombie books (c.f. Brian Keene's gore encrusted potboilers) usually show humans being as bad or worse than their ghoulish opponents, with human institutions like governments and armies collapsing into non-existence or brutal predation of ordinary civilians. Brooks dares to think differently and his book is a breath of fresh air.

Brooks gets the details right, tells a fine story, and makes the Zombie War seem very real. Zombie fans need to read this, and non-genre fans with some familiarity with the zombie plague concept will also probably enjoy this. No significant flaws, many many virtues!

1 out of 5 stars

Good idea. Worst. Execution. Ever. September 15, 2006
46 out of 137 found this review helpful

At last, a book for those who feel that the living dead rising from the grave to devour and destroy the living will, obviously, usher in an era of leftist-progressive utopia.

No, really. Zombies attacking world-wide would obviously solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem by producing a viable two state solution, right? I think we could all see that one coming from a few miles out. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as the world degenerates into a non-stop fit of inexplicable, unrealistic and (in the face of a zombie rising) just plain silly behavior.

World War Z consistently derails itself by losing focus on the issue at hand to go off on snide political asides, both large and small.

As another reviewer already noted, we are told that the "last brushfire war" (for which, read: Iraq) left the US too war weary to do anything but roll over and play dead when the undead hopped up intent on brain eating. We're also told that the military could not fill its ranks because too many veterans were bitter about having to serve in said brushfire war (never mind the US military actually having little problem meeting recruiting goals) -- and are somehow given to understand that a draft would not be instituted in any case with a massive rising of the undead.

But, gentle reader, have no fear! In the power vaccuum of poor war weary America steps the United Nations. Ironic, for an organization whose main claim to fame has been enabling genocide in places like Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Balkans, we are given to understand that the UN successfully leads the charge to fend off the zombie hordes.

In summary, this book is twenty dollars and several hours of my life I'm never going to get back. Apparently for readers who have not suffered enough in the reading, expect a big budget movie version sometime soon (Hollywood, of course, apparently loves this thing) to deprive you of another couple hours of your life.

Grade -- F. Really, if you are thinking about reading this book, save yourself the pain and just go watch Romero movies or something. Certainly this book is not a fitting follow up to the author's previous (and entertaining) Zombie Survival Guide.

1 out of 5 stars

Yawn of the Dead July 10, 2007
40 out of 83 found this review helpful

You hunker down, shaking and in a cold sweat, deep underground, your face lit only by the flickering luminesence of the CRT screen. Reports from your Team---dispatches from the few field soldiers left in the locked-down bioweapons complex, miles beneath an irradiated surface overrun by the flesh-hungry Living Dead---look grim.

The news is not good. The Main Level Hatch was somehow breached hours ago. Sector 13 is totally overrun, Lab Level contaminated, the infected eggheads now hungry for a different sort of brains. Doc Lavinov said the Dead can't crawl, but judging from the video-feeds coming from the air-duct security cams---well, looks like Doc was wrong.

They're coming through the big air vents. They're almost here. Soon you will be faced with an impossible mission.

What is it, you ask? Will you have to crawl 30 stories up an active nuclear silo & squeeze yourself into the command gantry, to launch a final strike against the Zombie plague from Hell's dark heart?

Will you have to race against time to concoct a zombie anti-virus? Design a special napalm launcher to burn your way to the surface? Hotwire a VTOL super-jet? Fake the zombies out?

NEGATIVE, soldier! None of the above! Your Mission Impossible: write a book that will make Humanity's War against the Zombie Menace staggering, mind-blastingly DULL. Dull as a turnip!

Sounds impossible, yes? I don't think so, soldier!---Max Brooks, son of Mel & author of the reasonably amusing "Zombie Survival Guide", has done just that.

Brooks cooks up "Z" as a firsthand account of the Zombie plague as it boils up out of China to ravage the world, related through a series of post-war interviews with the War's survivors: military techs from Russia, naval officers aboard a rogue Chinese nuclear submarine, a dastardly biotech billionaire, the former Vice President of the US, the Chinese doctor who examined the elusive "Patient Zero"---and so forth.

Sounds interesting & novel, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Max Brooks's "World War Z" boasts the dubious distinction of turning the end of the World as we know it into a really tedious read.

Really, if you want to know what reading "World War Z" is like, it's like filing your income tax return, eating Lima Bean & Mayonnaise Casserole, winning a 40 dollar shopping spree at a dollar store, and playing your great-grandfather consecutive games of checkers for a three-week jag, all at the same time. I would rather sever my own arm and eat it raw than ever read this book again.

It's not hard to figure out what went wrong here:

1) Interviews aren't exciting. They're post-war, which pretty much kills the apocalyptic fear-factor girding the loins of most flesh-eater romps. If somebody (boring) is talking to a (boring) interviewer, then we made it. We survived.

Go team. Knowing we made it---well, how would "Night of the Living Dead" have played if the flick started out with Ben and Barbara yakking it up about their 'close shave' from their timeshare in Rio?

Exactly.

2) Brooks simply isn't able to create vivid, distinct, living, breathing characters. Result: every interview sounds the same. Same 'voice', same slang, whether you're talking to a Valley Girl or a Chinese nuclear scientist.

3) Worse still, Brooks just can't write: I mentioned that all the character voices sound the same. That's true, but it gets worse: they're all voiced by---well, let's just call him Mr. Bland. Mr. Bland is front-&-center on every page of World War Z.

If you dig the level of writing you find on the back of a pillbox or in a late-night real estate infomercial, you'll dig Mr. Bland. Hey, World War Z might be the book for you!

Worse, Brooks hasn't bothered to do the minimal background research (not into the Living Dead, silly---they don't exist---I'm talking geography, military tactics, the works), and that further strains the narrative. Suspension of Disbelief I can dig. Brooks asks you to launch your Disbelief into Orbit.

Case in point: the Battle of Yonkers, where the US military is overrun by the Living Dead. Why? Because the brass fights the thing like it was the set-piece from Day the Earth Stood Still. By piling everything---armor, artillery, hovercraft, jarheads, the works, baby---into one alley in Yonkers and waiting for the zombies to eat everybody. Oh, and they also decide this one single battle is gonna be it, because hey, why worry about having a backup plan.

Oh, and they forget to bring enough ammunition. Seriously.The US army getting caught off guard and overrun by running zombies? That I can see. The US military getting chomped by critters that a 98-year old palsy victim with a decent walker could outrun? I don't think so.

Anyway, the Hell of it is that the 'War' is all wrapped up about 1/3rd of the way through; the rest is a sort of post-apocalypse walk through the nifty big government "New Deal" style social programs the survivors set up afterwards. If you're the kind of person who digs on crop reports and reading the minutes of the local Daughters of the Revolution Knitting Society, you'll probably find this stuff lively & engaging.

Bottom line: If you are a baked potato, or find yourself saying things like "gosh, I think it's time to re-read 'Farmers Almanac 1997 again', you might enjoy this book.

Otherwise avoid, unless you're really looking for a novel way to get your Z's---and I'm not talking about the undead kind.

JSG

2 out of 5 stars

The PC Version of the End of the World November 19, 2006
38 out of 55 found this review helpful

Max Brooks has written a must-have history for Romero (or just Zombie) fans every where. Unfortunately, while the story starts off strong, it soon dribbles into a series of disjointed and, occasionally, pointless vignettes.

It would be a difficult tale for anyone to carry, given the format that Brooks has chosen to use: a large number of first person accounts of the near take over of the world by the stumbling zombie hordes. There's no single narrative string for the audience to follow and no heroes with which the reader can identify. I found myself eventually becoming bored with the different ways that Max's characters described the zombies - there's only so many ways to say "undead."

To make up for the essential sameness of the story line in every individual short story, Max begins to increasingly rely on overblown rhetoric. For example, a chain-smoking military veteran, recovering in a psychiatric ward, breaks out of semi-literate street-slang to describe zombie heads popping like "Kristal corks." Far from being effectively descriptive, it becomes a distraction that made me start looking for more examples of excessive hyperbole.

I think the book would have held up better if, in addition to the large number of independent accounts, Max had found a way to weave a single unifying thread, giving his audience some one to root for and a reason to keep reading. A difficult, but not impossible task and Max Brooks appears to have the talent needed to pull such a task off; but the lack of heroes, or even characters most readers can identify with, makes this a book with no compelling reason to finish. You can stop on one page, flip at random through the book, start reading again and never feel like you've lost your place.

And speaking of heroes - this is really a minor complaint, but once you've figured it out it begins to annoy - Max's characters are all of a type: a PC type.

That is, such heroes as the various stories allow, are divided into sympathetic and non-sympathetic groupings. The sympathetic, most effective, characters are all minorities, women, or handicapped. The non-sympathetic, least effective, characters are all white and male. His bias goes so far that there's not a single heroic cop, survivalist NRA member, or even effective military unit. The president of the United States (sympathetic-minority) is contrasted against the vice-president (unsympathetic-white) by citing many instances of the great president's wise guidance, while the vice president is simply described as "the wacko."

I'm not saying that it's impossible for the world to be saved by any particular group. It's Max's book and he can take the tale where ever he wants. But it's so transparently obvious a bias that, once you figure it out, you find yourself mentally forecasting the characters entirely independently of their stories. It's a stretch and distracts from what could have been a more balanced (and more interesting) tale as a result.

All that said, I started out by saying that tome is a "must-have" for Romero loving Dead-heads like me and I stand by that statement. For all it's rambling plot and hyper-kinetic speech, it's still the best new installment in the zombie pantheon for many a day. I predict great success in it's admittedly limited demographic.

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