Title World War Z Series --- Author Max Brooks Cover Art --- Publisher Broadway Books - 2013 First Printing Crown - 2006 Category Horror Warnings None Main Characters Too many to list Main Elements Zombies

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'?"

I'm not a big zombie fan, I don't really get the appeal. So you might wonder why I read it. Well, I found it in one of the free book exchange boxes and people were making a big deal of it, wanted to know what all the fuss was about. This book did not make me like zombies. However, I did actually enjoy the book.

What I liked was the format. At first I thought the short interview format would be annoying, but on the contrary, it was fascinating to see the same event unfold from a myriad of different points of view. You have a little of everything, of course quite a lot of the interviews were with military, they were on the front lines battling them and that adds excitement. But there were all kinds. And all kinds of reactions, people either found a strength they never thought they had, or they cracked.

There were a few that really stood out, like that Chinese submarine. Or the two guys in Japan who stayed behind. There was one that talked about dogs and their trainers and how they played a big role. You have the soldiers discovering that old techniques don't work, and finding new ones. I mean, the main way to win an old fashioned war is to scare the enemy, convince them they can't win. But the dead know no fear, they know now pain, they never retreate, they just mindlessly keep coming. And think about it, if even one of them escapes (and they can hang out in the bottom of oceans and lakes, frozen in the arctic, whatever) it could start all over again.

It was very strange reading this after COVID. It was written before it, but you can see how things quickly get out of control. Fortunately COVID was no plague of the undead. For everyone one of us that dies, one more is added to the other side.

I was impressed with the author's knowledge of different cultures and how they might react to something like this. From trying to hide it from the population, trying to build a wall around your country to keep people safe, to basically not doing much at all. Though the overall story is broken up into these short snippets, you still get a very clear story arc. Even Canada got mentioned, though just barely, mostly 'cause everyone could run up here and the zombies that pursued them would freeze for the winter. As I'm freezing in my house and its halfway through April already, all that cold has to be good for something right?

And then I wached the movie. I had no idea how they would take this kind of format and put it on screen...well, they didn't. They took the book title and made up absolutely everything else. From super speed zombies (the ones in the book you could outwalk), to running around to find a cure (they don't in the book, there's a fake vaccine people make profit off of, but that's as close as they get), and well...one central character that single handedly saves the world. In the book it was clear it took the efforts of pretty much all the survivors to pitch in in some way. After all if you are a CEO, your skills are not so handy as a mechanic or farmer, but you could still do manual labour under their supervision. Brooks put a lot of thought into the way everything would change and what kinds of new societies might grow out of what's left.

The movie? As one person I talked to about it said, the only thing she remembered was that one guy tripped getting into a plane and died. It was a zombie movie like any other zombie movie and was unfortunate to share the name of what is a pretty unique book. Glad I read the book first since if I saw the movie first I wouldn't have bothered.