World War Z?

Question

Is it any good? And how is it put together? Is it a story, or a documentary of sorts? I heard about it, and went to Barnes & Noble to buy it, but I read a bit of it, and it just looked like an interveiw.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I just finished this book over the weekend, and I've been recommending it to everyone--it was fantastic!

It's a literary 'mockumentary'. The premise is that humanity has recently survived a global war... against zombies. The book is set up as a series of interviews with survivors and key players in the war (generals, heroes, policy makers). The interviews are then placed chronologically, so that the events are described in the order that they happened. The overall effect is that you are presented with the Zombie War from start to finish. You get the entire history without it ever feeling like a history lesson or textbook.

It may sound boring on the surface, but I was riveted. The descriptions of zombie attacks are absolutely chilling, and the author has done a terrific job of bringing his characters to life. You get an incredible sense of who these people are, what they have been through, and why they reacted to it the way that they did. And everything is woven together beautifully: characters will refer to one another, and incidents recounted at the beginning of the book have huge implications for people later on.

The whole book is extremely clever. Don't let the fact that it reads like non-fiction turn you off. It is by turns terrifying, moving, and hilarious.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Answer 2

Well, it's not a "documentary" (unless you happen to believe that we went to war with Zombies.)
But here are a couple of web sites below that talk about it.

A sample:

"“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War

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.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?"

THE BOOK

FINALLY, THE WORLD WILL COME TO KNOW THE TRUE STORY OF HOW DANGEROUSLY CLOSE THE HUMAN RACE CAME TO ITS DEMISE

WORLD WAR Z
An Oral History of the Zombie War

Answer 3

it' an amazing book worth read. free download http://ebookee.org/World-War-Z-Max-Brooks-PDF-LIT-MOBI-EPUB_1699877.html

Answer 4

You are asking if there used to be ever a ten yr international battle combating ZOMBIES? The mind consuming undead? I am going to inform you the reality. Yes it's precise. The battle used to be brutal and we needed to kill many many zombies. Oh what a difficult battle that used to be killing the zombies.