World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Ratings838
Average rating3.9
Despite it's awful reviews, I enjoyed the movie for WWZ. It's hard to read a review of it without people mentioning how much it butchered the book. For what it was it was great – but the book is able to explore on a level that would never work for a movie. The book itself takes place after World War Z, the zombie war. The narrator interviews a series of people from around the world as they elaborate on how they participated in the war. These range from the origins of the disease and how it spread, to how countries adapted with it, to submarines, to how humans faced off and eventually cleaned up after the war.
If you've ever wondered “I like zombies, but what would it be like if we did ?”, then you'll truly enjoy this book. It's much less about action and more about strategy and motivations to keep on living.
Excelente visión apocalíptica a través de entrevistas a sobrevivientes de una plaga de (adivinen...) zombies. Es una visión que trata de abarcar toda las aristas de las regiones del mundo y cómo es que cada bloque decide afrontar la situación con mayor o menor suerte. Nos habla de la psicología humana y la posibilidad de esta de sacar lo mejor y lo peor. A través de cada personaje vas obteniendo información que se va tejiendo con la de la siguiente o la anterior entrevista, cuidando mucho los temas de continuidad y realismo, dando la sensación de que en verdad esto pudo pasar. El único momento que no me convence del todo es el tiempo que propone el autor para recuperarse del problema. En fin, es una lectura que vale la pena, aunque no seas fan de los zombies, pues más que una historia de zombies es una historia sociológica.
This book is a really good docu fiction about what would happens to earth if there is a zombie infection!
There are really good shorts stories about how it started and how they fought it!
The whole book is just about facts from people who lived that war!
I hoped this book would be the one that made the like zombies...nope. Probably great in some people's opinions, but I found it horrendously boring.
Reading this with the hindsight of Covid is impossible given the differences in how China vs the US handled the outbreak. The blatant Zionism is also gross. A fun concept destroyed by a writer who clearly thinks they're much smarter than they are.
Going into this book after having already seen the movie, I was expecting something closer to that. I was extremely surprised to see that it surpassed any expectation I had.
The book follows someone interviewing many people of many countries as they tell their stories of what they faced during the ‘zombie war'. I found that the book and its situations seemed a little too realistic. I could see America acting exactly as they did in the book. This isn't a bad thing but more shocking and enjoyable. It felt more real, like this actually happened.
Overall, the writing was great and the format of the book was surprisingly enjoyable. I would recommend this look over the movie. You don't need to be a horror fan to enjoy the book either.
It's written as a series of short stories that aren't really even connected. I don't like short stories so this is not for me
This book is about as 2006 as you can get. It should be studied in a museum for how Americans used to see themselves and the rest of the world at the height of neoliberal self-belief. It is a story written in a world before the GFC, Trump, and COVID.
The best example is China being shown as technologically backwards and administratively inept with their inferior communist government.
The concept is cool, but hard to pull off in an engaging way. Also I can't be the only one confused at how similar every single person sounded. Surely you could get an editor to run through it and help give each individual a unique voice. I didn't even realise some characters had come back at the end without checking their names.
This was one of my favorites when I was in HS, too bad it turns out Max is a pretty disapproving person in real life...
One of the best books I have ever read, hands down! I've never re-read another book more. Max Brooks has an uncanny ability to make the zombie apocalypse seem like it's real history and truly scary. He understands that, much of the time, the true horror is the humans around us rather than the monsters themselves. The book takes you all across the globe, with stories told from different perspectives of characters from all walks of life. A blind monk, a young girl who barely could understand what was happening, military men/women, a bodyguard to the rich and famous, a shut-in, K-9 units, the list goes on. The cultural differences that are touched upon are SO sensitive and in-depth, you truly feel like you're reading an actual historical account of something the human race has been through. It's nothing like the over-the-top Brad Pitt focused movie of the same name. I will DEFINITELY be reading it again sometime soon!
3.5 stars
This was a lot better than I initially expected! It's more about the reaction to the zombie outbreak by various countries around the world and the effect it had on people during and after.
As its told completely in interview format, it really suits being consumed in an audiobooo format as its a full cast and all of the voices and accents are done well.
I will say that due to the interview format it got a little repetitive towards the end, but its not a long book so easy enough to get through.
Interesting format, but not my favorite type of story telling. A few pretty intense stories, but not much of a climax or anything.
Hit and miss, some stories were interesting, others I found a bit boring. I definitely prefer a book with an overarching storyline, something this was missing almost entirely.
A coincidental time to read this book given the pandemic of COVID-19 that would occur a month after picking this up.
Can't say it's a crazy page turner, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. Brooks has captured the human spirit very realistically, from all our good to all our bad. There's not much to say – it's a zombie book. But a very realistic one.
So I definitely missed the boat on this - both novel and film. i have had a copy of the book in my shelf for a year or so, but wasn't drawn to it. Holiday was an opportunity to read it and leave somewhere or trade it in on a new book.
There is no doubt it is topical, with Covid 19 going nuts in the weeks since I returned. There are some interesting parallels, but none too far beyond expectation. (Think origin: China; think the rich barricading themselves in, and trying to impress everyone on SocMed; think widespread panic and fights to buy such inane objects as toilet paper, or cans of tomatoes). The crazy preppers are having a field day proving how right they were, although hopefully the guns and ammo prove unnecessary!
Written in a series of interviews (the oral history part of the title), and loosely categorised into chapters to outline the story. These are titled Warnings, Blame, The Great Panic, Turning the Tide, Home Front USA, Around the World + Above, Total War, and Goodbyes.
Didn't really do it for me, I found the style repetitive, and the bravado and tough talk was not compelling reading for me. I am also not a huge zombie fan, so it isn't a huge surprise.
2.5 stars, rounded to 3.
Isolation in NZ (shutting down non-essential businesses, closing schools, restrictions on travel, restrictions on contact with other people) starts Wednesday, tomorrow being allocated to planning and logistics.
Hope everyone stays safe out there.
I read this initially a long time ago in conjunction with the Zombie Survival Guide (also by Max Brooks). I decided to give it a re-read because my friends and I are playing the new(ish) video game World War Z. The game is loosely based on the movie and the movie is in turn loosely based on the book. I'd say the game and the movie are more similar than either are to the book.
3,5 stars
I lived with my best friend for a couple of years. He has a copy of this, a present from his sister and I remember having read about 15 pages of it years back, but now I sat down on my ass and actually did it. It was time.
With a lot of zombie survival stories it is a question who survives and who doesn't and that's basically the source of the story and your interests. Here we know these people have survived, they are remembering the stories of how and all the different challenges of the process. It was definitely a different and interesting way of looking at things.
So why isn't it more stars for me?
- There are many, many technical military elements about it, with descriptions of equipment, technical stuff way above my head. I don't know shit about that. Sure, it was realistic to go into the technicalities, but at the same time to me personally it wasn't as interesting as some other chapters.
- Many of the people sounded the same. Sure, there were very well-written parts and interesting ideas, but the voices weren't as different from each other as they could have been. There were so many different people, I am not going to say it would have been easy. But still.
- Because we spent so little time with individual people I feel sometimes I didn't understand the references to each other. I didn't bother remembering names, so there is that.
Some stuff was really great about it, I especially loved the K-9 unit chapter and the two Japanese men who ended up meeting a teaming up.
There were so many practical things I didn't think of in connection with a zombie invasion, which is a great thing.
All in all, it was a worthwhile read.
Really fun as an audiobook, though the voice acting quality ranges pretty significantly. A really cool treatment of a zombie story, though a few plot points were a bit odd.
This was a cool book with a unique structure, piecing the exactly how the infection started, spread, proliferated to full-on war, and the response and fall-out and recovery thereafter through transcriptions of oral interviews from all kinds of people from all walks of life and all corners of the world. It does give a great picture of the entire world, and how all people had these unique (but all quite scary) experiences after the outbreak. Knowing enough about public health as an editor of textbooks in that topic area, I felt like this was a terrifyingly realistic story. The non-linear narrative is refreshing and the perfect form for this story. I'd recommend reading it, but build up your bunker first. And don't read alone in the dark... or on your first trip to rural China.
Not a fan of the anthology style, but very well-done and the full cast performance was excellent.
From a technical standpoint, this is a really good audiobook. Its cast is chockfull of great actors, including Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, Kal Penn, Nathan Fillion... all doing great performances. There's great moody interlude music too.
But as for the story itself, it is pretty interesting, but there's a lot of different ones with one general theme - the apocalypse, which at this point has already happened. So most of your interest in the current chapter depends on how engrossed you are in the current story or in its voice actor, as the story they're telling isn't happening in current time.
Unfortunately for me, I found the concept to get pretty tiring at about the halfway point of the book. There were still a few highlights after that, but I wouldn't say I needed every single one of those interviews to be in this. I guess I'd have preferred to have fewer stories, and have each of them a bit longer. Then you could make each of the stories very good and not have so many one-offs with one that you're into and then followed by one that you're not.