World War Z (2006) - Book Review

First, I'd like to say that there are many people out there for whom zombies just freak the hell out of. The images of the zombies in World War Z that Max Brooks describes are almost as an afterthought. Yes, without the zombies there would be no World War Z and they are an important part of the story, but they are a secondary character to the real story that makes up the novel that is World War Z.

World War Z was published by Max Brooks through Crown Publishing Group in September 2006. For those that don't know Max Brooks is Mel Brooks' son. Mel Brooks wrote, directed or starred (sometimes all three) in such films as Blazing Saddles, Robin Hood Men in Tights and Young Frankenstein, among others. Knowing the kind of stuff Max grew up with being raised one of the best parody or farce actors, it makes sense that Max would take something as horrible as the living dead and create one of the best novels, and now movies, in several years.

When I read this I kept going back in my mind to the Howard Zinn A People's History series. This is a series that teaches history from the ground up, in other words from the common person's point of view. For instance, one of the books is about the American Revolution. In this book, Howard Zinn doesn't tell the story of the American Revolution through John Adams, George Washington or any number of the other big names; no, instead the story is told by slaves, women (and I'm not talking about Abigail Adams), men who work in the field or on the docks. The story is told by the everyman, not the "celebrity" of the day.

It is this aspect of World War Z that I like. When you read World War Z you can imagine Max Brooks traveling all across the globe talking to survivors of the war. He begins by going to the source of the infection in China. The narrator finds out that the infection began in a small village when a boy and his father went "night fishing". What the boy and his father were doing was salvaging artifacts from a sunken town they had once lived to try to sell and make money. The father disappeared and the boy was bitten. The boy came back to his "new" village where he died and then reanimated. From there the epidemic began.

I liked the part where the narrator traveled to Antarctica in order to interview a man that helped create a vaccine for the virus that creates the zombie. Unfortunately, the vaccine is useless. The vaccine neither cures nor prevents people from being infected. Worse yet, people who think that they can be cured or an infection can be prevented go home and after they die they infect there entire family and eventually their neighborhood. The narrator only interviews this guy once, but later on in the book, close to the end, the new head of the SEC indicates that the new U.S. Government is in talks with the Holy Russian Empire to not renew the lease on the building this guy is staying in. If that happens and he returns to any part of reconquered Earth, he most assuredly will be executed on the spot.

Thee are stories of kids who grew up without parents, some right from the beginning others later on. There is a story of a woman who was four years old when the war began and she never really grew up, at least mentally. There is another story of a teenage girl that went north into Canada with her parents and nearly starved to death, with her parents.

A majority of the book is about the actual killing of the zombies. I know that sounds weird, the zombie is already dead. To eliminate a zombie you have to take out the brain or the brain-stem. Max Brooks talks about the weapons that were used at the beginning of the war, and also the ones that were developed during the war.

The narrator describes one scene in which a Chinese submarine captain decides to load as much supplies as possible, along with his crews family and leave China. The submarine is successful for quite a while. At one point they try to regain some sense of normalcy, but another Chinese sub attacks. The crew of the AWOL sub thinks they are being attacked because they left and stole the sub, but what is really happening is that China went through a civil war, as well as the Zombie War. The second sub was on the opposite side of the civil war.

If you like zombie movies and books, I recommend World War Z. If you like to read, just to read... I also recommend World War Z. I give this 9 stars out of 10, but unfortunately Shelfari.com only has a 5 Star System so I give it 4 Stars on there. World War Z was well written and I liked it very much. I can't wait to see the movie starring Brad Pitt, not that I am a particularly big fan of Brad Pitt, I just want to see the movie.