Title: World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
Genre: Horror, SciFi/Fantasy, Post/Apocalyptic. War
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Character: Probably the guy that is bringing us the story, our main narrator. Though, I did really enjoy some of the people he talked to, too.
Publication Date: October 16th, 2007
Plot Synopsis: (From
Goodreads)
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 book 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 reader, 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'?"
Review:
I really, really liked this book. I think that since normally dystopian and apocalyptic books, this is only the ones I've read, tend to just focus on one people, but I just feel like it tends to zero in on one person (or just the US). I don't know why, because it was so much more interesting to read it from all these different perspectives, all these different people who lived around the world and their different experiences
I think the best part was defnitely that it wasn't America-centric. It's pretty well divided, I think, between a bunch of countries. And I really enjoyed that, I also really enjoyed that it wasn't just what happened after everyone excepted it. I also really liked these zombies and how they worked and that was heavily investigated as people just really needed to know, to survive. And it's interesting how much you don't think about all the problems if something can only be killed with destroying the brain.
The way it was written was also, surprising, when I first started it. In the form of interviews, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. The different voices are very distinct, even just in writing, and the interviews are separated, so it was so interesting to learn about these specific people, what they faced, and then the overall outbreak. This book is, truly, incredible, and I'd highly, highly recommend it. (Also get the unabridged audiobook, the full thing, because it's incredible).
Audiobook specific:
I actually reading physically more. This has nothing to do audiobooks, it's just how I am. However - this audiobook was incredible - the way it was done, with different people, and how it wasn't
dramatized (that can be annoying), it just had different people as the different voices. It was incredibly fantastic to listen to and I highly, highly recommend you check it out. If you're an audiobook fan or not, and I don't listen to a lot of them (my attention tends to wander), but this one had my attention.
