World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks

I think zombie books are infecting the market because all of us are so bone-weary of war that we want an ultimate, total war that will end them all. And zombies can deliver that.

Max Brooks's World War Z first came up on my radar when I was listening to a very amusing interview between Neil Conan and the author on NPR's Talk of the Nation. This mock interview consisted of Mr. Conan asking Max Brooks what the status was on the front lines of the World War Z, as though it were a real news report and the zombies really were wreaking havoc on the world. The piece was intelligent, unique, and perfectly timed amid the rather dreary real-life news: economic doldrums and more deaths in the Coalition's ongoing struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's taken me a while to finally get around to it, and I'm pleased that it made it off the To Be Read list.

World War Z is refreshing in its narrative style. Max Brooks has traveled around the world just after the final cleanup from the great zombie war and is interviewing prominent and everyday participants in the war. The entire story is told by these interviewees. Max Brooks himself interjects follow-up questions to his interviewees occasionally, but the majority of the narrative is just the interviewees talking. The Chinese doctor who treated patient zero, the Israel Mossad agent who proposed a plan to his government that slowed the onslaught, the U.S. soldier who took part in the first major battle in New York, the young woman who's family fled north to the Canadian tundra to escape the zombies, the bodyguard who defended a multimillionaire estate for the owner and all his VIP celebrities until desperate people stormed its defenses . . . the list goes on.

Most of the interviews were interesting, each showing a new light on aspects of the war and how people changed because of it. One of my very favorite stories was of the relief pilot delivering supplies when her airplane malfunctioned and crashed. She was the only one of her crew who survived and she had to reach the safety of the freeway overpass, fighting her way through zombies and a broken ankle. There were a couple slow stories, one of them being the man put in charge of the wartime production in the retreat zone of the Western states. He talked about how he organized the retraining of CEOs and service provider professionals so they could put their energies into the war effort. That dragged on a bit.

Even with this interrupted narrative, Brooks still manages to tell an overarching story about the war. You see a beginning, middle, and end of the war, even though it is from such very disparate perspectives.

Brooks is very quick to give social commentary and satire. Some of the prominent commentary was his little joke about Paris Hilton--I was laughing on and off for an hour after reading that one--and how the U.S. military didn't have the recruiting manpower for the war because we'd exhausted our manpower and national will to conduct war in the drawn-out recent war. He's very nonspecific about Paris Hilton and the mentioned war, and is careful to do this with all his commentary on personalities and events prior to the World War Z.

World War Z is very poignant--probably the most meaningful zombie novel yet. The New York Times bestseller status for this book is well warranted. I'd recommend it to the same group who liked A Man and His Dog (I Am Legend) and who enjoy the concept of zombies and what they symbolize without all the excessive and meaningless gore often found in the genre, even though WWZ still has its share of zombie warfare violence.


World War Z, by Max Brooks. 2007. Crown Publishing Group. 342 pp. $10.17 (PB).