About book World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War (2006)
Zombie stories have been told in many different ways and teach us many different things. Some zombies are slow and teach us about the dangers of mass consumerism. Some zombies are fast and teach us about the dangers of infectious diseases. Sometimes the zombies take the backseat to a small group of unlikeable zombie-infestation survivors who sit around bickering, making poor decisions, and having circular, intro-level philosophical arguments until you are praying that the undead will rip their tongues from their still moving mouths. In this latter scenario, I am of course referring to the television version of The Walking Dead. Max Brooks’ World War Z is different from anything you’ve seen or read before. I’m fairly certain about that. This is because Brooks has taken as his inspiration not George Romero or Robert Kirkman, but Studs Terkel. That’s right, Studs Terkel: the famous, Pulitzer Prize winning oral historian.Terkel’s The Good War and Hard Times, his most famous works, are not traditional nonfiction narratives. Rather, they are oral histories that collect the stories of a vast web of people, all with differing points of view. Each of these individuals tells their own story, a small part of the whole, in the first person, using their own words. Terkel would introduce the different stories with a dateline and a short, indented paragraph that explained a little bit about the each person. Then, he would stand back and let that person have their say. This is the exact template that Brooks (acknowledging his homage) uses in World War Z. And I think that’s important for would-be readers to know. This isn’t your typical zombie novel. It’s not your typical novel at all. It has embraced the oral history conceit and plays that out to the end. In the world of World War Z, ten years have passed since the zombie apocalypse. The UN has decided to compile a report on the conflict, with Brooks playing the role of investigator. The official UN report relies heavily on facts and figures. Accordingly, Brooks decides to publish the personal stories – a collection of anecdotes – separately, in order to give readers a sense of how the Zombiegeddon felt. World War Z has eight chapters, not including an introduction, and within each of those chapters is a half-dozen or more remembrances from people around the globe. These chapters go in chronological order, so that the first chapter retells the outbreak of the zombie virus, while the final chapter covers the mopping up. In between there is a whole lot of blunt force trauma. The marvel of this book is the scope of its imagination. Conceptually, it is brilliant. Max Brooks has created a gritty, fully-realized, epic-sized scenario for the end of the world. And what’s more, he seems to have taken a giddy delight in doing so. Jumping from character to character, we “learn” how the disaster started and spread, and how countries as different as China and Israel dealt with it. Other witnesses describe the difficulty in fighting the zombies, and Brooks goes technology-geek as he rattles off made-up weapons systems (mixed in with actual weapons systems) used to combat the undead: No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shots…the tanks had these things called canister shots…basically a giant shotgun shell. They fired these little tungsten balls…not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for every G, but f—k, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a total loadout of forty! The rest were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a “Silver Bullet,” an armor-piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of walking corpses? Nothing!Brooks’ previous zombie-related book, The Zombie Survival Guide, was a tongue-in-cheek, hipster must-have. World War Z has had its tongue ripped from its cheek. It is grim, as in, Zombie War veterans suffering from PTSD grim. It paints a bleak picture of a shrinking number of defenders facing overwhelming odds. Brooks’ zombies are old school. They are the slow and shuffling pre-28 Days Later undead. Even so, Brooks clearly outlines what makes them such an unstoppable force. He makes you imagine an enemy in the hundreds of millions, that doesn’t get rattled, doesn’t get scared, and doesn’t stop, ever. And he also forces you to imagine psyches of the survivors, who among other things, are forced to dole out hundreds of head injuries in order to survive. The reality in a book like this is that some of the stories are going to be better than others. It would go too far to say that World War Z maintains an absolutely consistent high level of quality throughout. I don’t think it does. Some of the individual histories are awesome. Incredible. Some of them are good enough to be short stories, tracing fierce dramatic arcs. Others have the twists and turns of a Twilight Zone episode. Among the standouts: a girl and her family escape to the north, hoping the cold will save them, but soon realize that despite preparations, they don’t have enough supplies (doomsday preppers take note); a downed pilot must make her way to safety through zombie-infested territory, with only the radio guidance of a Skywatcher to help her through; a Chinese nuclear submarine goes rogue and discovers an ocean filled with sea-zombies. It is to Brooks’ credit that he strives for a breadth and diversity of experiences. There is a chapter devoted solely to the United States, but he gives more than ample time to zombie survivors from all corners of the globe. One of the problems I had with this book, though, is despite these diverse characters, the narrative voices all sound the same. It doesn’t matter if you are a Chinese doctor, an Indian engineer, a wild child who allegedly can barely speak, or an American soldier. All the narrators express themselves in the same way. The only difference is that some people use more jargon and slang than others. Thus, it was really hard to differentiate each person, except on the basis of how cool or memorable their encounters were. This lead to me not really caring about anyone on a human level. All these characters were nothing more than names and a means to execute a concept. Moreover, by utilizing the conceit of an oral history, Brooks removed the direct threat of the zombies. All these stories happened in the past, some as long as a decade ago. There is no longer any danger. You know that the storyteller has survived. Sure, lots of people died, but no one that the reader knows about, cares about, or can relate to. There are dozens of times when an oral historian sighs heavily, reaches for a smoke, and commiserates about their losses, but these are just words that ring hollow. Despite this, Brooks has succeeded masterfully at envisioning a nearly-ended world. I am a fan (I admit, guiltily) of apocalyptic fiction, from On the Beach to The Last Ship to The Road. Most end-of-the-world lit strives for realism in describing the destruction of society and the nascent civilization left struggling in doom’s wake. All these books seek to teach you a lesson by evoking the mortal dread of abandoned automobiles, burnt-out cities, and unburied corpses. World War Z is as successful as any other novel I’ve read in fulfilling the requirements of apocalyptic fiction. Of all the things there are to fear in the world, zombies do not rate very high. And of all the things that might end our world, I fear zombies less than killer bees, and slightly more than killer dolphins. Still, Brooks has done such an incredible job visualizing the fictional results of a zombie horde that part of me felt it was all quite possible.
I haven't seen every zombie movie or read every zombie book in existence, but I have watched enough to know the cliches of the genre. It was so refreshing to read a book that avoided so many of these conventions and covered some new ground. I mean, how many zombie stories span the entire world? How many cover the entire apocalypse, from Patient Zero to the aftermath/rebuilding? Aren't we all a little tired of zombie stories that closely follow a small group of survivors, as they get picked off one by one?Each chapter is only a few pages long, and consists of an interview of one individual survivor. These survivors range from the powerful elites who made decisions affecting millions, to the most inconsequential peons swept up in the winds of war, to the soldiers on the front line. Each interview is unique in a number of ways; the individual's personality and experiences, their nationality, their role in the events. The nationality of each character in particular is what makes this book so interesting. Whereas most zombie movies I've seen take place in the US (and often end with the heroes fleeing to Canada for some reason), virtually every corner of the world is represented in World War Z. Every nation deals with the crisis in it's own way; the Canadians flee to the arctic, the Americans try to fight the zombies as they would a conventional war, the French use the opportunity to rebuild their national pride, the South Africans rely on a war measures plan developed during Apartheid, the Russians keep control of their military through decimation. Part way through the book, I realized that what I was reading was sociology disguised as science-fiction/horror. Some might argue that the sociology is somewhat sophomoric and predictable, and they would have a point. But remember, this is not written as a history, it's written as an oral history. Each interview is just one man or one woman, and that's what the book is really about. The big picture stuff is interesting and compelling, but this is about individuals surviving, each in their own way. As the author asks in the introduction: “isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past”?Which brings to mind another interesting aspect of World War Z. In the first pages of the book the journalist conducting the interviews explains the rationale for compiling an oral history, and states his intention to avoid any interpretations or intrusions into people's stories. We hear his questions in many of the interviews, and occasionally an interviewee with react to his body language but otherwise he is virtually silent. It made me wonder about his story. We know that he is American, and that he was commissioned to write a report for the UN. Given what we learn throughout the book, we can probably assume that he spent the war in the “safe zone” in California, but there is no direct evidence. This is not a criticism of the book; on the contrary it's a compliment to the fact that the author does such a good job removing the journalist from the interviews. It left me wanting more.As a clinical psychologist, it was enjoyable to see the author imagined the psychological trauma that would result from something unimaginable. Of course, there was reference to standard, expected illnesses like PTSD and depression. But we also encounter some creative and reasonably plausible conditions such as the quislings, feral children, and Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome. The human psyche is capable of incredible things in response to trauma and stress, and it says a lot about this book that the author made a point to reach beyond the kinds of reactions that people have in the real world and try to picture what would happen in this reality that he created. At the same time, given the fact that we are reading the stories of survivors, we are almost by definition hearing the tales of the most resilient ones. As you read World War Z, you can't help but wonder what you would do in this situation. How would you react waking up in a world that makes no sense? I think most people would like to imagine that they would be strong, moral, and resilient, and would always be ready and willing to do the right thing. But most people also believe that they wouldn't violate their morality in response to demands of an authority, and research has shown otherwise. If WWII led to the Milgram obedience studies, what kind of psychological research would emerge in the aftermath of World War Z?
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I had three responses to World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Here they are:Surprised: I didn’t expect to like World War Z at all. I’m not even sure why. I like Brooks’ parents, so that shouldn’t have negatively impacted my expectations. I’ve loved Zombies since first I saw Return of the Living Dead in the movie theatre, so I was predisposed to like this book. So I dunno. But I had low expectations, and they were thoroughly exceeded. It is a great idea, and Brooks’ total commitment to his mock history was convincing. There were times when I couldn’t help letting my imagination run to a parallel universe where this War had actually happened.The best part, though, was the places Brooks took his Zombiepocalypse – places only The Walking Dead has even approached. Most Zombielit is about the outbreak. The Walking Dead takes the next step, letting us see what it would be like to be a survivor of the outbreak, what it would be like to live during the Zombie occupation, but Brooks gives us the aftermath. How he hell does the earth rebuild after something like that? Brooks takes a pretty convincing stab at imagining how, and it isn’t pretty, nor is it even all that inspiring. I buy it, though. Fulfilled: My low expectations didn’t extend to the Zombie violence. Even with the oral history format, I expected gore and grotesquery and nastiness, and I got exactly what I expected. There were even a couple of kick ass violent – and not so violent – superlatives, like the marine-Zombies attacking divers, the madness of Yonkers (a pretty impressive moment, actually), the greed of Breckenridge Scott and his Phalanx, and the Redeker Plan (along with the Redeker Twist – which was my absolute favourite part of the book).Disappointed: Once Brooks blew apart my low expectations with some strong writing and brilliant ideas, he created a new expectation – and a very high one that he failed to deliver on.Brooks attempted to make his book a global chronicle of the Zombie War, and he populated World War Z with characters from nations on every continent. By the end of the book, though, they were homogenous. The Japanese folks didn’t sound Japanese. The Russian folks didn’t sound Russian. Everyone sounded American. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Brooks gave in to the temptation to make America and their “great” President the saviours of the human spirit. Yep, the Yankees led the charge to defeat the Zombies, to take the war to the Zacks rather than hiding in their fortresses and embracing safety. We bought an antique piano today, and we were comparing middle C on our dreadfully out of tune piano and our electronic keyboard. The warbling shred of the antique piano made the kids sad because they wanted to sit down and play, but they knew they couldn’t until the piano is tuned. That sadness is exactly the way I felt about Brooks’ decision to make the USA the heroes of his War, but there’ll be no chance of a tune up to take away my sadness.
—Brad
One of my hobbies is film adaptations - comparing source material with the movie script to see how they differ. I wanted to read World War Z because I saw the movie version and had heard it was very different from the book. This is true. The book as written is unfilmmable -- it's a series of interviews with people around the globe and their experience during the zombie apocalypse. Chunks of the book are very militaristic and we hear from soldiers, commanders and other government agents about the battles with the undead. The scenes are vivid and engaging, but the writing got bogged down with acronyms and other minutiae. The sections I liked best were the discussions of how people reacted to the attacks, how society crumbled and then slowly tried to build itself back up again. Because everyone interviewed in the book is a survivor, they all had different stories about how they actually made it through. This novel gets at the heart of some truths of human nature, such as that when threatened, people will act in their own best interests. Or how quickly fear can spread and cause a massive panic, disrupting all forms of civilized life. Early in the book there is a description of a battle at Yonkers, where the army has decided to take a violent stand against the zombies. But when the undead seem to keep coming and coming, fear spreads among the soldiers, the line crumbles and the whole battle goes south.Another example is what is called the Redeker Plan, which was South Africa's plan for the military to temporarily retreat, and to only save a selected "valuable" number of the civilians. Other countries adopted their own versions of this plan. Anyone who has studied the history of genocide knows that governments and armies will willingly allow entire sections of a populace to be sacrificed, if they think it supports their own goals and survival."First of all, there was no way to save everyone. The outbreak was too far gone. The armed forces had already been too badly weakened to effectively isolate the threat, and spread so thinly around the country, they could only grow weaker with each passing day. Our forces had to be consolidated, withdrawn to a special safe zone."Overall the book was interesting and thought-provoking, but too many sections felt superfluous and dragged on. I think the narrative would have been improved with some sharper editing.For those who have seen the movie, there are only a handful of scenes in the book that were kept in the film -- the two versions are so different that the title should have been changed.Update May 2014:After hearing positive reviews, I listened to this on audiobook, and it was an improvement over the print. They used a cast of actors to narrate the different voices and stories, and most of the performances were great. The cast included Alan Alda, Carl Reiner, Henry Rollins, Mark Hamill, John Tuturro and Rob Reiner. The description of the Battle at Yonkers was particularly well done. Another strong section was the story of Colonel Christina Eliopplis, who survived a zombie attack with some guidance from an unknown voice on the radio. And Rob Reiner has such a great voice that I wish he recorded more audiobooks.However, the one sour note was the voice of author Max Brooks, who read the part of the interviewer. Poor Max. With talented parents like Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, I expected his performance to be less contrived.First read: June 2013Second read: May 2014
—Diane Librarian
this book. is brutally fantastic. i'm not sure if i've ever used that particular combination of descriptors before, but it fits. this is the same guy who wrote the "zombie survival guide," though i will have to rely on the husband to tell me how much of that manual informs this book, as he has been reading that one. both books were his christmas presents, btw, and i had no real mission to read either, but i started idly flipping through world war z out of boredom, and the next thing you know i had finished it. zombies have only recently been part of my life, and unfortunately, if there is a class of experts regarding this particular "virus," i belong in it. this comes from being married to someone who scouts out every place we go, be it wal-mart, the mall, a restaurant, for possible weapons, fortification sites, and plausible escape routes in the event of a zombie invasion. these things invade my dreams, frighten the living hell out of me, but still, this book rocked my socks.what makes this book interesting is that it takes the form of an honest to god historical account, complete with footnotes. the author chronicles individual accounts of a zombie infestation that sweeps the entire world and puts the human race on the brink of extinction. it takes itself absolutely seriously from cover to cover, which is part of what makes it so successful. it's written for an audience who presumably knows the basic history of the war, which of course, we do not. it does not explain the timeline, it does not define certain events, just refers to them as though you will recognize what the speaker is referring to. you are expected to catch on, read between the lines, fill in the blanks on your own, which fuels your imagination while simultaneously leaving you begging for more. it's just the right amount of information, i think, because even though i would have liked to see a basic chronology of events, have some background information available, i think the writer was right to give me less than what i think i need, because having that information might actually detract in the end. unlike the traditional zombie movies (the exception that comes to mind being the latest romero flick, land of the dead), this looks beyond the immediate desperation for simple survival, and explores the effects on economy, military, government, commerce, trade, etc. things you might not normally consider (if you spend time considering the fallout of a zombie infestation), such as what refugee patterns would emerge and how that would jeopardize different nations, the fortune that would suddenly be made in human trafficking, the impact on our oceans and atmosphere, which nations are tumbled to the ground and which ones rise from the ashes to gain prosperity and power, the desperate yet woefully ineffectual efforts made by civilians to survive (when they do not have survival skills), the spread of the virus through infected organ transplants, the zombie threat underwater, the fortunes made by pharmeceutical companies off of fake cures, and a LOT more. aside from these unique and fascinating perspectives, brooks writes a painfully honest account of the human factor. the danger facing humanity was not just from zombies: it was humanity itself. the psychological damage incurred by soldiers, witnesses, survivors...he paints a clear picture of how merely avoiding a zombie bite was not enough to keep you alive. it's brilliantly imaginative, utterly fascinating on all levels, and so worth the read even if you have no interest in the living dead. though, if you are sensitive to nightmares, be on your guard. i've been dreaming about this stuff like crazy. the past couple of nights.
—Swaps55
