World War Z by Max Brooks

Rating: 4.0

What it's about:
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. Brookssays 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’?” - taken from Barnes&Noble.com

My thoughts:
I enjoyed World War Z by Max Brooks. It starts out with a human being bitten by a zombie which starts the initial outbreak. It quickly spreads around the city, the country and eventually the whole globe. War is declared against the zombies.

World War Z is unique in it's perspective....it's written as an oral history. The narrator is taking down these oral histories about ten years after the end of the war. The only fault I can find with the book is that after a while it seemed a little repetitive. I wish Brooks would have varied his characters a little more. Most of the interviewees are military personnel or political figures. It would have been nice to hear more from everyday people. This book had some really creepy parts and a lot of human emotions were displayed. Brooks did a great job with making World War Z seem so real. I really got the feel of what the world might be like if it were infested with zombies....and it's not a pretty picture!