World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

3.5 Stars

Book 19 in my Zombie-a-thon!

CW: described suicides of people who do not want to turn into zombies after being infected, gore, loss of loved ones, death

Well that was a mixed bag but overall a very engaging book. Some of the people interviewed told brilliantly frightening stories of zombie hordes sweeping through their towns. On the other hand, the interviews with authority figures whilst necessary for context, were dull as dishwater. I listened to this as an audiobook so appreciated the use of voice actors to reflect the international nature of the apocalypse. Very entertaining!

It took me ten years to finally read this one.

More than a decade ago, I got a copy as a present that was later lost before I could even start reading it, and with an ever growing TBR my initial enthusiasm soon became a nagging voice: you should read it, everyone seems to think it's good.

Well, yes, I did read it even if it took long, and I read it after a pandemic, which made some of the references and stories within feel all that more chilling... nonetheless, it'll take me a bit longer to post a proper review. For now, know that I think it's a great take on the zombie trope, one that feels really too close for comfort.

I haven't seen every zombie movie or read every zombie book in existence, but I have watched enough to know the cliches of the genre. It was so refreshing to read a book that avoided so many of these conventions and covered some new ground. I mean, how many zombie stories span the entire world? How many cover the entire apocalypse, from Patient Zero to the aftermath/rebuilding? Aren't we all a little tired of zombie stories that closely follow a small group of survivors, as they get picked off one by one?

Each chapter is only a few pages long, and consists of an interview of one individual survivor. These survivors range from the powerful elites who made decisions affecting millions, to the most inconsequential peons swept up in the winds of war, to the soldiers on the front line. Each interview is unique in a number of ways; the individual's personality and experiences, their nationality, their role in the events. The nationality of each character in particular is what makes this book so interesting. Whereas most zombie movies I've seen take place in the US (and often end with the heroes fleeing to Canada for some reason), virtually every corner of the world is represented in World War Z. Every nation deals with the crisis in it's own way; the Canadians flee to the arctic, the Americans try to fight the zombies as they would a conventional war, the French use the opportunity to rebuild their national pride, the South Africans rely on a war measures plan developed during Apartheid, the Russians keep control of their military through decimation. Part way through the book, I realized that what I was reading was sociology disguised as science-fiction/horror. Some might argue that the sociology is somewhat sophomoric and predictable, and they would have a point. But remember, this is not written as a history, it's written as an oral history. Each interview is just one man or one woman, and that's what the book is really about. The big picture stuff is interesting and compelling, but this is about individuals surviving, each in their own way. As the author asks in the introduction: “isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past”?

Which brings to mind another interesting aspect of World War Z. In the first pages of the book the journalist conducting the interviews explains the rationale for compiling an oral history, and states his intention to avoid any interpretations or intrusions into people's stories. We hear his questions in many of the interviews, and occasionally an interviewee with react to his body language but otherwise he is virtually silent. It made me wonder about his story. We know that he is American, and that he was commissioned to write a report for the UN. Given what we learn throughout the book, we can probably assume that he spent the war in the “safe zone” in California, but there is no direct evidence. This is not a criticism of the book; on the contrary it's a compliment to the fact that the author does such a good job removing the journalist from the interviews. It left me wanting more.

As a clinical psychologist, it was enjoyable to see the author imagined the psychological trauma that would result from something unimaginable. Of course, there was reference to standard, expected illnesses like PTSD and depression. But we also encounter some creative and reasonably plausible conditions such as the quislings, feral children, and Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome. The human psyche is capable of incredible things in response to trauma and stress, and it says a lot about this book that the author made a point to reach beyond the kinds of reactions that people have in the real world and try to picture what would happen in this reality that he created. At the same time, given the fact that we are reading the stories of survivors, we are almost by definition hearing the tales of the most resilient ones. As you read World War Z, you can't help but wonder what you would do in this situation. How would you react waking up in a world that makes no sense? I think most people would like to imagine that they would be strong, moral, and resilient, and would always be ready and willing to do the right thing. But most people also believe that they wouldn't violate their morality in response to demands of an authority, and research has shown otherwise. If WWII led to the Milgram obedience studies, what kind of psychological research would emerge in the aftermath of World War Z?

3.5 stars.
Glad I found it at a second hand store and reread it, had forgotten most of it. An interesting and intruiging way of telling a zombie story.

I liked this book way more than I expected to. This book is the story of a zombie infestation told from many people perspective of the crisis. I thought this book had a lot of important messages about everything from immigration to community. I haven't read a ton of zombie like stories so I wasn't completely sure about what to expect. I listened to the audiobook for this one which is something I don't do very often (thought I'm starting to try to borrow more from my library) but I think that it was the right decision for this book, especially as it is titled as a oral history. The copy I listened to had a full cast and I thought all the narrators were very good in their roles(it even had Mark Hamill). I know some people really don't like audiobooks, but I would say if your thinking about reading this book to try the audiobook if you can get your hands on it. I also know some people don't like changing perspectives in books, but I've never had a problem with it and I thought it worked really well in this book. I really liked seeing how different survivors from different places dealt with the outbreak. I found myself being really interested in the stories of all the different people. During my listening of this I didn't really think of it as a zombie book because it is really character based. It was really more about many different peoples different approaches to surviving a crisis so if you want a more horror like, gory, zombie story this may not be the book you are looking for. Overall I really enjoyed this story, way more than I thought I would, I really liked the audiobook, and I would encourage people thinking about reading this book to definitely pick it up, whether as an audiobook or a print one.

*Updated after rereading. 10/12/20*

This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version this time and the all-star cast does a fantastic job. The weird thing is that the jumping off point for the American political aspect had that 2006 W. Bush era mindset which seemed kind of dark and cynical at the time, but now seems incredibly naïve and quaint these days. The stuff about how various governments around the world either react swiftly or fail completely in a time of crisis really hits home these days.

*Original review.*
While his previous book was a tongue-in-cheek zombie survival guide, Brooks turns deadly serious here. Written as a series of survivors' stories in a UN report following a world wide war with the undead, Brooks crafted a classic horror novel that reads like history. Inventive, scary and a must read for anyone who ever enjoyed a George Romero zombie movie.

6.0 Stars. One of my All Time Favorites. This book took the well-worn concept of "the world is being taken over my zombies" and turned it into a global, thriller that looked at both the beginning, middle and end (?) of the struggle from a series of different viewpoints that explore the social, political, environmental and financial effects of such events. Superbly done and I can not conceive of a better standard for the genre. Oh yeah, and it is a real page turner and is NEVER boring.

(My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' word-count 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 pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point-of-purchase 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 point-of-purchase 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 early 2000s. 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 point-of-purchase 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 next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand-in 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 third-world countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or European ever could be. Oh yeah, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I mention the face-eating 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 from 2001 to '03; 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 third-world 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-9/11 intelligence-gathering, 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 military-industrial 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 thinly-veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, power-hungry 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 Cold-War 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 full-on 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 press-friendly "zombie response" set up by the Bush-led 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 human-on-human 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 Bush-type 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 Pulitzer-winning The Road; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyone-for-themselves 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 village-centric rural areas of southeast Asia, the infrastructure-poor 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 middle-class 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 non-action; 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' mass-murder.)

And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one; because as...