Friday, April 4, 2014

Word War Z by Max Brooks

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’?”

10 comments:

  1. This is the second time I have read this book and you really find things you diden't see the first time. I like how the book is formed in "eyewitness accounts" so that each chapter has its own style and feel.

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  2. I haven't read the World War Z book but I did see the movie are they anything alike? If not what are some differences between the two?

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  3. Do you like the book. It seems it is full of action. Have you seen the movie and If you have what is the same and what is different.

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  4. Do you know if the book is similar to writing style to any other zombie books you have read? You said it is written in "eye witnessing accounts". How exactly are the peoples accounts described? Is it through their point of view, with Max as the narrator?

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    1. The format is that the author is traveling the post zombie war world gathering information from survivors and such. For that reason it is unlike any-other zombie book I've read.

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    2. Does it also mention anything from the authors point of view, or just the survivors?

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  5. To Alden: the book and movie are incredibly different. For one the movie is told from the point of view of one person while the book is told from aver a dozen different views. Also there is none of the fast zombie or wound camo stuff in the book.

    To Damien: this is a great book, that also has lots of action. I believe that the book is better because of the reasons above.

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  6. DO you know why this book is called World War Z? It sounds like people meeting zombies, not really like a war to me. Do you have a favorite "eye witness account" or something? Is this a book or a text book kind of thing?

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    1. Its called world war Z because the Z stands for zombie. One of my favorite passages from the book is one where refugees in India are escaping into the Himalayas and they have to blow up the highway to keep the zombies away. There's this great line where it says how the millions of zombies falling off the edge sound like rain drops on a roof.

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  7. This sounds like a.... Cheerful book. I have to agree with Kahla's last post here though, it doesn't sound at all like a war. To the best of my collected knowledge on the subject through your posts, there's not really any fighting, just hiding, running, and death.

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