It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality.Based on the extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight-back against the horde, World War Z brings the very finest traditions of American journalism to bear on what is surely the most incredibly story in the history of civilisation.
My Review:
This book completely took me by surprise.
As any of my regular readers or anyone that knows me will know, this is definitely not my regular genre of book. It's like nothing I have ever read before, not only in the incredibly creative and irregular way that it is written, but also in the way that it completely mesmerised me, in a way that no book in this genre or this style ever has.
So basically, for anyone whom hasn't heard about this book or seen the movie starring Brad Pitt, and seriously if you haven't - get on it. If you like zombie movies, action movies, a bit of medical backstory and of course, looking at Brad Pitt for 2 hours (I mean, who wouldn't love that), then it's totally a movie you need to get onto. After you've read the book of course.
But as I was saying, for anyone that knows nothing about the storyline, basically this zombie infection arises in the world which in turn creates an apocalyptic environment with the world's militaries trying to fight off this zombie invasion and take back the world that is theirs.
I know it sounds cliche and just like every other zombie book/movie that you've ever seen or read. Which is exactly what I thought too. I mean, I'd seen the movie and I loved it, but I never really had any interest in reading the book.
That is, until I found it at my boyfriends house and he started ranting about how great it was.
So I decided to check it out, and completely fell in love with it.
Now, it is written in first person (which is my usual preference) but not in the way that you might think. The book, whilst following the storyline of the war in relative chronology, doesn't actually have any sort of protagonist.
Not only that, it doesn't have any main or central characters at all.
It's written in the form of a report, of many interviews all compiled together of different survivors of World War Z as they all tell their story to our, I guess you could call him a narrator. The interviewer.
Whilst this was really intriguing to me and I honestly respect the author Max Brooks so much for being able to pull this off in the way that he does, while still creating perfectly easy to follow prose and a definitive timeline. It did draw out my reading of the book quite substantially, as I felt the need after every small interview section, to sit and digest what I had just read before moving on to the next, a different story, in a different location with a different character.
It did take a lot out of me reading the book because of this, it was quite exhausting to concentrate on at times, almost like an information overload. But, saying this, each story and interview was so thrilling and so suspenseful, that as soon as I did start reading a section, it was near impossible to put the book down.
Overall, I give this book 8.5/10 stars.
