Jason's Reviews > World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

ZOMG!

The first time I ever saw that chat acronym my brain immediately registered zombie. Is that weird? I mean, I figured out pretty quickly that the acronym is nothing more than a joke, a mere play on words (so to speak) made at the expense of lazy n00bs whose left fingers slip off the shift key in an attempt to type, “OMG!” But somehow that initial association has stuck with me, as even now when I see someone type it (and usually it’s Ceridwen, Queen of Internet Memes, doing it ironically), I think of the undead. Or when I’m walking alone at night and hear a scraping shuffle and a familiar guttural moan, and some cold, rotting fingers fall lazily onto my left shoulder, my immediate reaction is never anything short of an instinctually exclaimed, “ZOMG!”

Shudder.

So yeah, this rating is no accidental slip of the Apple trackpad; World War Z really is 4-star material. Instead of presenting a been-there-done-that narrative wherein a group of protagonists fall prey to a zombie epidemic, whose lives change with shifting priorities, whose outlook becomes fundamentally survivalist, and who ultimately learn to cope with their situation and depend on themselves and each other to combat the swarms of undead infesting their world, Max Brooks takes a different tack. Here, we get Bolaño-style interviews with key political and military figures from across the globe who are involved in the conflict, along with individual accounts of those who have survived the epidemic. It is a cross-sectional human-interest look at what occurred at the onset of the epidemic, who failed to heed the warning signs and why, who was responsible for its spread and how, and what the world did—both on a grand scale as well as in Joe the Plumber’s backyard—to tackle it.

And tackle it they do. Essentially a “current events” book, this is not meant to project the possibilities of a distant future. It is the here and now of a planetary disaster with painstaking attention paid to the details of not only the epidemic’s spread, but also to the practical logistics encountered on the path to its defeat. The stories are short, but effective. And like Bolaño’s interviews, there is a uniformity in their voice (even with interviewees hailing from different countries), which could be seen as a failure on Brooks’s part, but it nonetheless worked for me. Brooks has a lot to say in this novel, from opinions on American foreign policy to a belief in the indefatigable spirit of humanity, and—ZOMG!—he says it well.