Max Brooks

This is one of my all-time favorite books. I'd already read it 2 or 3 times years ago, but listening to the Audiobook version was a real treat. It almost felt like I'd never heard this story before simply because the structure lends itself perfectly to an Audiobook format. It was as if we were listening to a radio play and it is absolutely phenomenal.

This has to be the most stacked audio cast ever - René Auberjonois, Alan Alda, Martin Scorsese, Carl and Rob Reiner, Common, F. Murray show more Abraham, Jeri Ryan and Mark Hamill and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Some voices don't quite nail the landing, but the overall experience is insanely good.

Also listening to it post pandemic makes the story even stronger and more chilling now that we've lived through something akin to it: the differences in how certain countries and cultures deal with it, the initial confusion, the misinformation spread, how some make a ton of money off placebos, the general hopelessness...it almost hits too close to home.

I don't know how a book I loved could become even more prescient or more interesting over time, but there you go. Incredible. show less

I'm not a big horror fan. I do remember watching all the zombie movies when I was a teen (in the 80's), but as an adult, "dark fantasy' was way more my thing that modern horror. I read this because it was on the NPR best 100 sci-fi/fantasy books list. I figured it would be okay and maybe pull off 3 stars, but HOLY CRAP, this book is a masterpiece.

Obviously, the format is pretty unique, with no main characters, more like a bunch of connected short stories, but much more closely related than show more when I've seen it done by other authors. Having viewpoints from all over the world was amazing. Mr. Brooks either really did his homework or maybe he's just a history/politics fan, because this wasn't just little action scenes all over the world, this was some deep thinking about how countries would actually react, both at the government level and the public level.

So happy I didn't miss out on this one, and also happy that I did it on audio since it had an entire cast of famous people from Rob Riener to Henry Rollins narrating it. show less

First read: June 2013
Re-read: September 2015

This book is sheer genuis. I don't know how else to describe it. I've never read anything even remotely similar to this anywhere else. World War Z is written as a factual book, with the author inserting himself into the story as an interviewer to the survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

However fantastical this plot sounds, it is actually so well written and researched it feels almost real. Brooks takes the reader all around the world to see how show more everyone coped with the outbreak, the initial panic (or the 'Great Panic'), how the survivors fought back and how we eventually re-gained some modicum of civilisation. We hear from veteran soldiers who fought now famous battles against the zombies or Zacks/Zekes, ordinary citizens in the middle of urban populations; mothers who fought zombies bare handed to save their children, politicians trying to fight a popularity battle in the midst of the crisis, corrupt pharmaceutical companies selling 'Phalanx' - a vaccine they knew didn't work, how rival countries used outbreaks as an excuse to re-ignite old tensions, how stranded astronauts on space-stations watched via satellite as zombies took over the world, and celebrities who enclosed themselves in 'Big Brother' style houses surrounded by webcams to capture their petty dramas and fake-tears over what was happening in the outside world.

Brooks has thought of everything - every possible outcome from a world under threat from zombie attack. How humanity would change - from way in which we fought wars and trained our soldiers, all the way down the psychological issues individuals would face when forced to deal with the living dead, and he has done it so masterfully. It feels so real all the way through. My favourite segment of World War Z is definitely the story that mentions North Korea. It has left me wanting to know more - do the North Koreans survive or are all 23 million citizens of that country now zombies?

In other reviews I have read on Goodreads, I can see there a few complaints about the lack of a cohesive plot - there is no one character who we follow from beginning to end (the interviewer we follow in theory is never really present apart from a few questions in the narrative). Each individual story about the zombie outbreak can be read on its own but there is a progression through the stories - we start at the outbreak of the disease in a remote corner of China and though each story we see how it progresses throughout the world and how various countries tried to fight or deal with the outbreaks, right though to the gradual restoration of a new humanity.

I have serious love for this book :)
Rating: 5/5 stars - one of the best re-reads of 2015

On a side note I also love the film World War Z but anyone who reads the book and hopes the film is going to be a faithful adaptation is going to be seriously disappointed. There are a few recognisable elements - particularly the segment of the film set in Israel and the fact the soldiers call the zombies Zekes but other than that they are two separate pieces of zombie fiction that share the same title and that is all. show less

"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review through Blogging for Books.)

In 1917 we left our home to make the world "safe for democracy." Even though democracy wasn't exactly "safe" back home.

We went by many names. The 15th. The 369th. And before going "over there," we called ourselves "The Black Rattlers." Our French allies called us "The Men of Bronze."

And our enemies called us "The Harlem show more Hellfighters."

Recruited in Harlem, trained in Camp Whitman, New York (and, disastrously, Spartanburg, South Carolina), and eventually deployed to the Western Front in France, the 369th Infantry Regiment - otherwise known as The Harlem Hellfighters - changed the course of history, even as its own government engineered its failure.

The 369th spent 191 days in combat - more than any other American unit, black or white. None of their men were captured by the enemy, nor did they lose any ground; in fact, they were the first men to reach the Rhine River. The 369th volunteered to stay behind in the front trenches for an expected German bombing the day after Bastille Day, 1918, even though it meant almost certain death. One of their soldiers single-handedly fended off German raiders with only a rifle and a bolo knife; for this, Henry Lincoln Johnson earned the nickname "Black Death" - and was the first American to receive the French Croix de Guerre (the Cross of War). In 2003, the US awarded Johnson the Distinguished Service Cross; his supporters are still lobbying for the Medal of Honor.

Despite the urgency of the situation - and the depth of their sacrifice - the men of the 369th (as well as other "colored" units) were consistently undermined by their own government. In training, they practiced with broomsticks, while private gun clubs received free rifles from Uncle Sam ("just in case"). Against their leader's stringent objections, the 369th was sent to Dixie to complete its training - even though, just weeks beforehand, thirteen men from the 24th Regiment were lynched in the wake of racial conflicts in Houston, Texas. And when they finally reached France, the 369th initially performed manual labor alongside black civilian workers.

African-American soldiers also faced racism abroad: both imported, at the behest of U.S. brass, as well as from ordinary French citizens (though some of this seems tempered by their gratitude for the soldiers' help: "While our own country didn't want us, another country needed us."). American policy vis-à-vis "colored" units was as much about fear as it was hatred: "They know what will happen if we return to our people as heroes!" As it turned out, the returning survivors of the 369th got the parade they were denied at the time of deployment - but they also came home in the Red Summer of 1919, only to find a country torn apart by racial violence.

The text by author Max Brooks (yes, of World War Z fame) is wonderful - both informative and engaging - and the illustrations by Caanan White are vivid and richly detailed. Sadly, the entirety of the book is in black and white; some color, even on strategically placed pages or panels, really would have made the artwork pop. Nonetheless, White's illustrations manage to convey the horror and desperation of war.

While writing about the origins of this graphic novel, Brooks quotes one of his college professors: "Colonization...begins with the mind, and the best (or worst) way to colonize a people is to bury their past." With The Harlem Hellfighters, Brooks shines a light on a mostly-unknown aspect of American history.

While his decision to tell the story in graphic novel format was mostly one born of necessity (for years Brooks struggled to bring The Harlem Hellfighters to the big or small screen, to no avail), The Harlem Hellfighters introduces this chapter of history to whole new audience: comic book readers, not all of whom would read this if written as a biography or history book. (Though hopefully it will also inspire readers to do further research on their own. To that end, Brooks provides a lengthy bibliography.)

In this vein, The Harlem Hellfighters is a potentially excellent resource for high school history classes; I know that, if my teachers had given us comic books instead of chapter after chapter of dry textbook reading assignments, I would have found the materials much more engaging.

I loved the graphic novel, but am holding out hope that The Harlem Hellfighters will become a movie or miniseries yet. Get on it, TNT. After Falling Skies there's nowhere to go but up.

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