Monday 24 June 2013

World Ward Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Definitely not like any zombie book I have read before.... and that's what makes it unique (Note:- I read the ebook and listened to the audiobook alongside). Presenting World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Here is the summary of the book:

Soon to be a major motion picture!

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’?”


Zombies.... the raging disfigured remnants of humanity. When it comes to a post-apocalyptic zombie book, you sometimes expect some form of biological hazard resulting in the zombie out break and the protagonist of the story going on a dangerous quest hell and back again to retrieve the coveted cure. Maybe something along the lines of Issac Marion's Warm Bodies (a surprisingly marvelous read and a good movie), Julie Kagawa's Blood of Eden series or Lia Habel's Gone with the Respiration series. But Max Brooks proceeded to deliver something akin to these preconceived notions.

A form of a journal.... that is what this book is. With the narrator collecting interviews across every nations on the globe. The main thing to keep in mind about the execution about this book is definitely not about the survivors or the zombies in general but it is what everyone around the globe went through in the great war. But zombies are there in the background as each interviewee explains their ordeals of the war. I'm going to go off tangent and somewhat compare the concept of the book to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where the titular character had no prominent role but the plot was devised around the man..... Just the same while zombies don't exactly feature on the foreground, they are very much present throughout the background of the whole book.



A book of such a global scale requires even more preparations and research than what a book normally requires. So many countries, so many cultures, different races & ethnicity, the accents even and their way of things..... he incorporated just about everything to the point. What the people did, how the countries came up with their own ways to tackle the situations and what the military conducted.... this is a coalition of all such facts and stories making it akin to a post-great war type journal.

Max Brooks did one thing more that sets it apart from the typical zombie genre..... he kept it grounded in reality. Zombie books have a way of being in the paranormal genre but World War Z kept it real, you get the feeling that it actually happened, the way the author presents the book. A side effect of which leads us to nor form connections with the plethora of characters, but its not them but their situations that situations that matter.

I would like to point out that I read it because of the upcoming film, which as I understand is going to follow the documentary styled book fully at all, since Bad Pitt seems to be the central character but I'll give it a go..... And people get this in audiobook, its an oral history. It serves better to ear it than to read it. I was moved to tears enough throughout...... have lost count of the number of times I bordered on highly emotional at the predicament of humanity.

"Max Brooks brings to us stories of a war like no other.... thought provoking and intense..... a call to humanity to right their ways before the unthinkable happens and it be too late to change"
Genre :      Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Post-war quasi-journal

Publisher: Crown

Release Date: 12th September, 2006

My Copy Bought(ebook and audiobook)

Rate:              5/5 (It was Amazing)

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