Book Review: World War Z by Max Brooks

My rating: 3.75/5

From Amazon: "The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years."

I haven't read Zombie Survival Guide yet, so, although the Guide is mentioned several times in this book, I can't compare the two.  I can say that this book is very detailed and well thought out, to the point that you almost believe it was really written from eye-witness accounts.  Though it's intended to be transcriptions of oral history interviews, the majority of it reads like it was always intended to be a movie script, or at least more like prose than like real people speaking.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it did keep my disbelief suspended only about a few inches above the pages.  (That being said though, it doesn't look like the movie based on this book is going to follow the book very closely; those movie zombies move dang fast, and Brad Pitt looks like he's in the thick of the action, not an interviewer/author. *shrug*)

A lot of the characters seemed really similar too. This may have been intentional, with everyone having gone through similarly terrible things during the war, but I kind of doubt it.  I can't say that the book was boring for this reason though; the stories and the detail made up for it and kept me interested. I'll probably go back and read the Guide soon.