World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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.