544 pages
French language
Published Jan. 22, 2010 by Livre de Poche.
“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
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 …
“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
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’?”
Such a fun read. The oral history format allows the story to be told in little episodes that come together into the full picture. I have never read anything quite like it. Brilliant, a fun read, very good story.
A great take on the zombie genre. If you like zombies, you will enjoy this book! It is a collection of first person accounts from the beginning of the infection through the end of "World War Z". It was a great read, I could hardly put it down!
Fantastic and enjoyable example of the zombie apocalypse genre, written in a clever "chronological interview" format. It definitely contains horror, but it's an excellent example of the genre.
Very clever "history" of the war against the zombies, told via interviews done after the war was won. I've read that the audio book is a particularly excellent implementation of the actual "tapes" of the interviews.
I'm not a huge Zombie fan. Like couldn't care less about Zombie stuff, the genre is just so played out. BUT. This was a good read, it wasn't over the top zombie and it didn't make it sound like the world is a bunch of idiots who can't escape a shuffling horde.
A great book, first and foremost. This one was recommended to me by a medic I was deployed with. At first I thought it was just going to be a book about zombies, but I have to say that it is extremely well written and seems to parallel current international events.
While I dont want to give anything away, I would definitely recommend this book to zombie enthusiasts but more importantly to anyone who enjoys a well constructed story with characters that you can relate too.
By the end of the book I wasnt thinking wow what a zombie book, I was thinking wow what a story.
Sucked. Only Max Brooks could write a zombie story and make it boring. The "interviewing survivors" narrative was a bad choice. Totally removed any drama or suspense from the stories - you knew everyone was going to live or else they wouldn't be alive to be interviewed! Plus, each character only got a handful of pages at most, not enough space to create in-depth characters. They were mostly stereotypes either because of this or because that's all Brooks knows. Despite the plague being dubbed "African Rabies" in the book, there is only one black character. I can recall two female characters in the book. One, the downed pilot, has a nervous breakdown while running from a zombie hoard and "hears" her dead mother's voice over her radio. The other, Russian soldier, becomes a human incubator spitting out babies. The other characters that seem like average joes but rise to the …
Sucked. Only Max Brooks could write a zombie story and make it boring. The "interviewing survivors" narrative was a bad choice. Totally removed any drama or suspense from the stories - you knew everyone was going to live or else they wouldn't be alive to be interviewed! Plus, each character only got a handful of pages at most, not enough space to create in-depth characters. They were mostly stereotypes either because of this or because that's all Brooks knows. Despite the plague being dubbed "African Rabies" in the book, there is only one black character. I can recall two female characters in the book. One, the downed pilot, has a nervous breakdown while running from a zombie hoard and "hears" her dead mother's voice over her radio. The other, Russian soldier, becomes a human incubator spitting out babies. The other characters that seem like average joes but rise to the occasion are modeled after friends of his father, Mel Brooks, such as the movie director character, based upon Steven Spielberg.
