World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks | Published: 2006
I read this back when I was on maternity leave and I loved it and I'm a bit ashamed to say...it's my favorite book.
Of all the books in the world, Buonaventura, your favorite is about zombies? You don't even like
zombies.
But you guys, this books is just so fucking
smart! It's like Brooks went and thought of every conceivable way society would be affected by a rise of the undead. How would it affect a refugee crisis? How would if affect suburbanites? What would happen in communist countries? Capitalist countries? Poor countries? How would an army have to change policies to defeat zombies? It was so thought
out!
This book is set up as a collection of interviews done after the zombie apocalypse, describing the rise and fall of the zombies all over the world from
forty different people all over the world. What a huge undertaking for a writer and yet he was able to convey forty-one unique characters with first person voices.
This book was
so good that it ruined Stephen King for me. When I had finished this, I started
Under the Dome and I just couldn't get into it because the writing was so juvenile in comparison.
So, I decided to revisit this when I found out there was a full cast for the audio book. You know how sometimes when you revisit something, it's not nearly as good but you built it up in your head? Not so for this. There were some "hokey" parts that I had forgotten about, like parts of Europe reverting back to the middle ages carrying long swords and living in castle communities. I mean, that's totally plausible, but it still seemed silly.
This book is even better as an audio book as it's used to its full potential as a collection of interviews. The cast is amazing and I'm sure I cried when I read it originally, but I definitely cried at the segment told by Sharon, a young woman with the mind of a child who describes escaping from a mass suicide.
This book is so damn good!
