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

I have this friend who read this right before me, and he hated it. He said that was because Brooks' "liberal Jewish agenda" shone through on like every page. (I should mention that said friend is himself a liberal Jew, for what that's worth.) I can see what he meant, though it didn't bother me the same way. What did bother me, though, was how much this book is framed like a movie. Framed, seriously. As in, each snippet is like a writeup of a scene in a film, including gestures, stage directions, subtext, etc. And so a lot of times it really hazed into corniness, which, um, yuck.

But for all that, it really did have incredibly gripping sections, and also really scary parts. Not overtly scary, just the kind of subtle fear that makes you whip around real fast when you're walking home at night and you hear the quick crunch of a plastic bottle being run over by a car. There were scenes that were uplifting, of course, scenes that were really intense, scenes that were upsetting in all kinds of ways (including one about dogs which I skipped because I cannot handle reading about bad things happening to dogs. That scene in the Will Smith zombie movie? It was the only part of the movie I saw and I cried for days.)

And it was really just amazingly vast in scope; Brooks really did a terrific job of imagining how every country, every culture would react to a full-scale world war against the undead. There're scenes in Chinese submarines, French catacombs, American suburbs, Israeli cities, etc etc etc. There's feral children and a million different kind of armies a mansion in Hollywood and a Japanese videogamer and more and more. A lot of really memorable stuff, actually, which is saying a lot for someone with a wretched memory.

So yeah. Pretty good book, and it's going to make one hell of a movie.