very pleasant surprise.
TBT, not a huge fan of the zombie subgenre: never watched an episode of the Walking Dead, never really bought into it as a fantasy vehicle.
So I picked this up with not so much trepidation as an allowance that I probably would not love it.
I didnt LOVE it, but liked it a lot more than I expected I would,
Heres the thing:
Its not JUST about an sitelinkI Am Legend scenario where the world turns into monsters.
Well it sort of IS about that but its also about a lot more, Author Max Brooks son of Mel “Its good to be the KING!” Brooks serves this up with a steaming hot portion of socioeconomic views, cultural observations and more than a generous side order of HAVEATYOU! postapocalyptic fudge.
You probably already can guess the premise, so no spoilers there is a global pandemic where damn near everyone gets turned into zombies.
Were talking Aliens Bill Paxton “GAME OVER MAN!” worldwide catastrophe, MOST of humanity is wiped out,
But Brooks narrative, told from the shifting perspectives of the survivors in a kind of postwar journalistic oral history novel patterned after Studs TurkelssitelinkThe Good War, is appealing for its plucky spirit and charismatic delivery.
Not just blood and guts, we get to know first hand about this event from start to finish and all the details in between.
Its the human element of this that works so well, the near remembrances of the survivors told from their perspectives,
I loved that Brooks develops a working vocabulary for the postwar survivors, The human soldiers call their zombie opponents “Zach” and he makes the astute observation that they no longer needed consultants and executive directors humanity needed carpenters and gunsmiths.
I was also drawn to one of the survivors recollection that his group loved to go into battle to the ear splitting tunes of Iron Maidens The Trooper.
So if you were like me and avoided this because it was just another zombie book go ahead and give it a try, its actually pretty good.
Well this didn't go as I expected, . .
I love postapocalyptic books, When I learned after watching the movie that there was a book I couldn't wait to read it! Turns out I was bored and had to skim through the last part.
. .
Love the story but hated the format with the "interviews",
The Written
New week, sitelinkNew BookTube Video all about the best and worst literary apocalypses to live through!
Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse.
Like after any great tragedy, the government wants a record,
Max Brooks is their oral historian,
Only, when he hands his documents, the bureaucracy whittles it down to the bare facts,
Humans, over every nation, dragged their bone weary bodies through this war,
They are now faced with the numbing task of rebuilding society,
They deserve to have their stories told, So, he publishes the true account of World War
Z,
Told in a series of vignettes, we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world.
And one thing is certain, life with zombies is a chilling tale,
The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our heartsThe vignettes are absolutely riveting.
There's a bit of the regular zombie murder mayhem but the story focuses on the human side of things, How the survivors, survived.
There's the blind man who fought off a hoard with no more than a blunt staff, Some people lost their minds succumbing to tree belief that they have joined the dead, There's the unintentionally cannibalistic family and so much more,
Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has,Audiobook comments:
Read by Max Brooks, Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese
Highly recommended you listen to this novel it's a quality production.
Every voice is countryspecific and the actors read very convincingly, It feels like I'm next to Max as he interviews the survivors,
sitelinkYouTube sitelinkBlog sitelinkInstagram sitelinkTwitter sitelinkFacebook Snapchat mirandareads The deadly epidemic started in China, This time its zombies.
.stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance,
I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but World War Z popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go.
I checked it out from the library I wasn't going to stick my neck that far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.
Anyway. World War Z takes the quasihistorical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of looselyconnected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world.
Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more, The lies that government leaders tell their citizens, The lies that people tell themselves, The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope,
It's definitely not your standard zombieflavored horror story, The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe e, g. , profiteering as in the moaning, grasping and biting adeath sentence if you get bit of the zombie hordes,
Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre, I thought it was fascinating, VERY different from the movie that it inspired, Having just read the most literary of all zombie novels makes one thing quite clear: haute lit amp this particular horror genre simply don't mix.
But that doesn't make the effort any less outstanding, unique, or outrageous, "WWZ" takes a scatterplot approach to begin to tell what's happened to the world after the zombie apocalypse has transpired, All accounts are so definitive, so individual as to seemauthentic, We get accounts all the way from the very heights of the social echelons Veep, Army generals, . . to the rantings of average civilians like a woman with ayearold's sensibility, for instance,
There is a type of reader out there for this type of narrative, They will adore the militaristic accounts though, admittedly, not my cup of tea, But the additions to zombie lore are awesome! From quislings i, e. live zombie impersonators to zombiedetecting dogs, this book is about zombies the same way the bible is about god, they are mostly background actors who are the reason other characters do what they do and occasionally they will rarrrr in and kill a bunch of people because they cant help it, but mostly they are an invisible presence, always to be feared but never given a voice.
this whole book takes place after the zombies have already destroyed most of the world and is a collection of the testimonials of hundreds of different characters detailing their experiences with the zombie outbreak, and how they have survived.
because of this, there arent really any action scenes, or any immediate terror, this book is more about politics and global concerns and human nature and dissatisfaction with the way the government handles natural disasters and im gonna say it, im gonna say it the zeitgeist woohoo than it is about maneating corpses.
it takes into account so many different aspects of postzombie experience that i never would have considered like what will the actors do now and what happens if a zombie gets on board your boat and how will this affect the rest of the food chain very multifaceted, if not what i was expecting.
also interesting: the role of castles in a zombie holocaust, and the underground tunnels in paris: unsafe, so for people like alfonso, who do not enter a room without first considering their escape routes should zombies attack, this could give some interesting perspectives about what may have been overlooked, and provide some good food for thought.
brains are for thought. brains are zombie food. you do the math.
uhoh book avalanche, . . maybe more later
sitelinkcome to my blog! My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' wordcount limitations find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcenter.
com.
Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to find, an endless series of fluffy popculture pieces designed specifically for crafty pointofpurchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether.
And so it's been in the last six months as I've heard more and more about this book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it even worse, that it had been inspired by an actual gimmicky pointofpurchase humor book, the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the earlys.
And even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky pointofpurchase humor books, the chances usually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say.
So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and astute look at the nextyears of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical standin for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an international culture these days terrorism, global warming, disease, natural disasters, showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises.
It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as "real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way and even more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of thirdworld countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middleclass American or European ever could be.
Oh yeah, and it's got faceeating zombies too, Did I mention the faceeating zombies
Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at Saturday Night Live fromto 'that no matter how smart World War Z gets and it gets awfully smart at points, it is still ultimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote thirdworld villages.
And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who used to be in charge of things basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become an unstoppable epidemic.
In Brooks' world, just like the real one of pre/intelligencegathering, we see that a few government smarties from around the world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus while it was still theoretically controllable just that their memos and papers went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge, as well as getting lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western militaryindustrial complex.
That's probably the most pleasurable part of the first half, to tell you the truth, and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying, schauenfreude kind of way" of watching the virus become more and more of a threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinlyveiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, powerhungry religious fundamentalists.
And in this, then, World War Z suddenly shifts from a critique about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations the Middle East and zombies, that is the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companies under the old ColdWar system companies, by the way, where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the people in charge, leading to such ridiculous situations as a fullon tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the "first grand assault.
" In Iraq, unfortunately, we found that a billion dollars in tanks still can't stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of World War Z as well, the pressfriendly "zombie response" set up by the Bushled government in New York's Yonkers neighborhood, done not for good strategic reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government had recently acquired, leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and journalists there by the chaotic zombie hoard that eventually arrives.
This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and humanonhuman deaths of several hundreds of millions of more people.
And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bushtype administration to adequately respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's complete meltdown of Bear Stearns the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United States, leading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to it
Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year's Pulitzerwinning The Road chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyoneforthemselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in such times of crisis.
Make no mistake, this is a damning and devastating critique of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things a book that uses the detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society.
It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part of any book that is the slowest and least interesting here Brooks uses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies as well as military fetishists.
Because that's the final thing important to understand about World War Z, is that it's a novel with a truly global scope Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, but also how such an epidemic would spread in the villagecentric rural areas of southeast Asia, the infrastructurepoor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success than others.
For example, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population density is just too high to do much of any good in his fictional world history, such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over.
Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well those who are already used to being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in their usual lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in such a world.
This is opposed to all the clueless middleclass Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into nonaction although that turns out to be true, poor planning unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' massmurder.
And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one because as,