World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

I am a zombie movie fan. Dawn of the Dead makes it into my top 5 movies of all time, and because I'm a qualified, certified film buff (BA in Film Studies), I imagine that says a lot. And where I appreciate the recent third wave of zombie films, I frown upon "fast" zombies. This is why:

Zombies aren't supposed to be scary. What is scary is how capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the state have cut us all off from one another to the extent that, when freaky weird shit starts happening, we have no ability whatever to deal with that freaky weird shit. We stand teetering on the brink of complete disaster at all times, because our first instinct is to fuck over everyone else (specifically poor people, non-white people, non-male show more people, people without power) in order to survive. The fear in zombie movies (good ones), is that we are so inherently broken by our bullshit systematic oppressions, that we cannot survive even the slowest, stupidest monster. When everything begins to fall apart, we are too weak to resist.

World War Z is like a series of great zombie movie ideas: What would a zombie threat do to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What are the affects of war-weariness from frivolous capitalist wars on the army's ability to battle a zombie menace? For that matter, how ineffective would the tech-heavy, Rumsfeldian "fast war" US military be against zombies? How would present-day China react to an outbreak of zombies? What if the U.S. was forced into Cuba to flee a zombie horde on their mainland?

I'm not going to say this was a great book. I am going to say, however, that I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I'd recommend it to any Romero-styled zombie fan. show less

World War Z is a fictional history written in the form of a series of interviews with numerous and diverse survivors of what was known as The Zombie War. The anonymous interviewer invites each subject to tell his or her story, with occasional further prompting via open-ended questions, giving the reader an impressive, relatively complete picture of how the catastrophe unfolded, evolved and eventually culminated in a precarious victory for the remaining living human population.

Although I was initially doubtful based on the number of words in gratuitous quotes contained within the introduction, that phenomenon was thankfully short-lived, and I was actually quite captivated by this book. It felt like a real, historical account, an show more impression aided by the interview format. The breadth and variety of interviewees was fascinating, and I wished many of their tales could have been lengthened. In addition, I was perpetually curious about who the interviewer was. Overall, a captivating, disturbing read containing some potentially good ideas to consider should we ever find ourselves in the midst of a real zombie plague. show less

I enjoy oral histories to a ridiculous degree. I'm pretty ok with zombies, although I am also sick of them. I enjoy when humans triumph over them. I like grand human plans and clever ideas and strategy.

This oral history in general is very well done. I like how we see the turn of the tides in how it's arranged; I like how plans are mentioned in different histories and we can put the pieces together. When Nelson Mandela died I actually thought about this book and how now he won't be around to save South Africa in the zombie apocalypse. That part of the book was just an absolutely compelling moment for me. I think my second-favorite was the movie-making, oh and the lady pushing herself through zombie-infested land by talking to herself on show more the radio.

I have absolutely no idea why they would make a movie with the title of this book that wasn't in the same format. Way to take away the entire point! Definitely not on my to-watch list. show less

The epistolary format really doesn't work for some people, but for me, it totally did.

I like the story, and I like that it's not focussed on the slasher gore aspect - there's only so many ways you can describe someone holed up in a house, fighting their way out with a machete, and after the first few it's tired, so I really enjoyed putting a different spin on it.

I like the sentiment, there's some astute observation about the nature of modern society and it's similarities and differences around the world. I particularly like the fact that the entire "World" war wasn't played out in Southern California, and that most of the survivors "interviewed" are clearly suffering from various kinds of PTSD and other fallout. Winning the war didn't show more save the day entirely, it damaged people.

I can see why a lot of people see this book as needlessly gimicky, and lacking characterization, but I found neither of those things to be true.

To each their own I guess... or you know, go tell it to the whales. show less