Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks wasn’t anything of what I was expecting it to be. I was expecting the actual zombie war, and what I got was – as the title states – “An Oral History of the Zombie War.†Let me start off by saying, this was not the least bit disappointing, because I love normal war history and could not have enjoyed this more. With the recent completion of my own novel, which included zombies, it was interesting to see the take that World War Z offered in the many different viewpoints that were available.
I particularly like the way the writer of the story took the viewpoint of the person taking the interviews as he went around the world’s significant and sometimes not so significant personnel for interviews. Some of them are military, and some of them are just people that lived. He performed the interviewing these people and asked them questions, and talked to them about what happened from their point of view, and in their part of the world. It was a unique perspective, and in the audio book version, available on audible.com, it had a large cast of readers to take on the voice and to bring out the character of the person that was telling his part of the story.
Many of the details in the stories were much more realistic than the halfway, joke-riddled zombie movies that you’re used to. It was a realistic view of what would or could be considered a realistic outcome and reaction by many people to a zombie outbreak. In many cases you would hear the people being interviewed have the opinion of that which you might consider yourself having if you were to hear tomorrow from someone that there had been a zombie outbreak.
It brings me to look forward to the movie that’s coming out and brings to mind the question of exactly how this book would be translated into such a movie, as this book is describing the past of what happened from the perspective of the people that were there. It would appear that the movie scheduled for the 2013 release is more about a U.N. employee racing around the globe trying to stop the outbreak of the zombie pandemic. If the movie maintains the level of sincerity and seriousness to the story that was maintained during World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, I very much look forward to seeing it.
Overall I rate World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War an 8.5 out of a possible 10. And although that I believe it was pretty good, I still believe there is an opportunity to tell a much better story of the actual zombie war with the same sense that the book has taken here, and I hope that that’s what the movie will do.
