BOOK READ World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War AUTHOR Max Brooks –

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New week New BookTube Video all about the best and worst literary apocalypses to live throughThe Written Review Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse Like after any great tragedy the government wants a record Max Brooks is their oral historian Only when he hands his documents the bureaucracy whittles it down to the bare facts Humans over every nation dragged their bone weary bodies through this war They are now faced with the numbing task of rebuilding society They deserve to have their stories told So he publishes the true account of World War ZTold in a series of vignettes we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world And one thing is certain life with zombies is a chilling tale The monsters that rose from the dead they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts The vignettes are absolutely riveting There s a bit of the regular zombie murder mayhem but the story focuses on the human side of things How the survivors survived There s the blind man who fought off a hoard with no than a blunt staff Some people lost their minds succumbing to tree belief that they have joined the dead There s the nintentionally cannibalistic family and so much Most people don t believe something can happen A Bride by Summer (Round-the-Clock Brides until it already has Audiobook comments Read by Max Brooks Alan Alda John Turturro Rob Reiner Mark Hamill Alfred Molina Simon Pegg Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese Highly recommended you listen to this novel it s aality production Every voice is country specific and the actors read very convincingly It feels like I m next to Max as he interviews the survivorsYouTube Blog Instagram Twitter Snapchat mirandareads Happy Reading At this current moment in time my husband and I do not actually have a working will We are the legal definition of intestate We have not yet m this book is about zombies the same way the bible is about god they are mostly background actors who are the reason other characters do what they do and occasionally they will rarrrr in and kill a bunch of people because they cant help it but mostly they are an invisible presence always to be feared but never given a voice this whole book takes place after the zombies have already destroyed most of the world and is a collection of the testimonials of hundreds of different characters detailing their experiences with the zombie outbreak and how they have survived because of this there arent really any action scenes or any immediate terror this book is about politics and global concerns and human nature and dissatisfaction with the way the government handles natural disasters and im gonna say it im gonna say it the zeitgeist woohoo than it is about man eating corpses it takes into account so many different aspects of post zombie experience that i never would have considered like what will the actors do now and what happens if a zombie gets on board your boat and how will this affect the rest of the food chain very multi faceted if not what i was expecting also interesting the role of castles in a zombie holocaust and the nderground tunnels in paris nsafe so for people like alfonso who do not enter a room without first considering their escape routes should zombies attack this could give some interesting perspectives about what may have been overlooked and provide some good food for thought brains are for thought brains are zombie food you do the mathuh oh book avalanche maybe latercome to my blog My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads word count limitations find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcentercomAnytime I hear of some funny gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set I always suint my eyes and brace myself for the worst because sually when it comes to such books the worst is all you can expect to find an endless series of fluffy pop culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point of purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether And so it s been in the last six months as I ve heard and about this book World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War which supposedly is a hilarious actual oral history about an apocalyptic war with the ndead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it even worse that it had been inspired by an actual gimmicky point of purchase humor book the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a Conard County Witness uick buck off the overly specific survival guide craze of the early 2000s And even worse than all this the author of both is Max Brooks as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky point of purchase humor books the chancessually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to saySo what a surprise then to read the book myself this month and realize that it s not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all but rather a serious and astute look at the next 50 years of global politics Childhood Dying using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand in for any of the pervasive challenges facings as an international culture these days terrorism global warming disease natural disasters showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book as real as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way and even astounding Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of third world countries in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat lazy middle class American or European ever could be Oh yeah and it s got face eating zombies too Did I mention the face eating zombiesBecause that s the thing to always remember that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at Saturday Night Live from 2001 to 03 that no matter how smart World War Z gets and it gets awfully smart at points it is still ltimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote third world villages And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in right from the first page of the manuscript itself by sing the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who Carrying the Sheikhs Baby/Awakening His Innocent Cinderella/The Tycoons Shock Heir/One Night with the Forbidden Princess used to be in charge of things basically by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn t affecting fellow white males then only paying attention after it s become annstoppable epidemic In Brooks world just like the real one of pre 911 intelligence gathering we see that a few government smarties from around the world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus while it was still theoretically controllable just that their memos and papers went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge as well as getting lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western military industrial complexThat s probably the most pleasurable part of the first half to tell you the truth and by pleasurable I mean witty and humorous in a bleak horrifying schauenfreude kind of way of watching the virus become and of a threat of watching entire cities start to go Sheik Defense (Desert Justice under because of the zombie epidemic then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinly veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards power hungry religious fundamentalists And in this then World War Z suddenly shifts from a critiue about AIDS to a critiue about Ira showing how in both situations the Middle East and zombies that is the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companiesnder the old Cold War system companies by the way where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they re not being the people in charge leading to such ridiculous situations as a full on tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the first grand assault In Ira Hot Seduction (Hotshot Heroes unfortunately we found that a billion dollars in tanks still can t stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of World War Z as well the press friendly zombie response setp by the Bush led government in New York s Yonkers neighborhood done not for good strategic reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government had recently acuired leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and journalists there by the chaotic zo.   World War Z The Complete Edition Movie Tie in Edition An Oral History of the Zombie War is a new version of Max Brooks' episodic zombie novel The abridged versions of the original stories are now joined with new nabridged recordings of the episodes that were not included in the original abridged version of the audiobook These additional episodes feature a star studded cast of narrators to coincide with the pcoming release of the film New narrators include Academy Award winning director Martin Scorsese Spiderman star Alfred Molina The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont rapper Common Firefly star Nathan Fillion Shaun of the Dead's Simo.

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Mbie hoard that eventually arrivesThis then gets Babys Watch / A Hero of Her Own us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet the Great Panic that is when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and human on human deaths of several hundreds of millions of people And again by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic and the complete failure of a Bush type administration to adeuately respond to it Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week s complete meltdown of Bear Stearns the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United States leading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse a collapse that happens so fast in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to itBrooks answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year s Pulitzer winning The Road chaos bloodshed violence inhumanity an everyone for themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to leads in such times of crisis Make no mistake this is a damning and devastating critiue of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things a book that Desire Island - The Niece uses the detritus of popular culture to masuerade as a funny and gross book about zombies but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society It snbelievable in fact how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle given how this is Sweet Valentine usually the part of any book that is the slowest and least interesting here Brooksses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies as well as military fetishistsBecause that s the final thing important to The Rancher and the City Girl understand about World War Z is that it s a novel with a truly global scope Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A but also how such an epidemic would spread in the village centric rural areas of southeast Asia the infrastructure poor wastelands of Russia and and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways some with success than others For example Brooks posits that in such places as India population density is just too high to do much of any good in his fictional world history such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over Other countries thoughsed to picking Ice Wolves (Elementals, up as a nation and fleeing for other lands survive the zombie outbreaksite well those who are already Some Like It Hotter used to being refugees for example see not too much of a difference in theirsual lifestyle from this latest turn in events ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in such a world This is opposed to all the clueless middle class Americans in the novel for example who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into non action although that turns out to be true poor planning More Than a Convenient Bride (Texas Cattlemans Club: After the Storm unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol mass murderAnd this isltimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one because as The book of war the one we ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely Marrying Well useless in this situation We had to write a new one from scratch With most apocalyptic situations I think the hardest part to deal with is that there are no wrong decisions or right decisions There are simply too many variables to consider if yourltimate goal is to survive The most meticulously planned strategies can still result in failure You make the best decisions you can and then hope for a bit of luck Should we barricade ourselves hoping to be saved or go North hoping the zombies will eventually become popsicles when winter hits Are we safer in the Tavern Wench underground tunnels of Paris or on a cruise ship or living in the woods by ourselves Whatever decision you make you must think long game and short game The short game the immediate concerns involve food water and shelter The short and long game both come into play when trying to figure out how to avoid becoming zombie chow Once you survive the first wave of contagion then whatThis book is written as an investigative report collecting all the experiences of survivors from around the world Different cultures reacted differently to the apocalypse Some were successful than others The learning curvenfortunately has to be short with apocalyptic situations especially if the hope is to actually salvage civilisation The lights go out and many of the comforts we ve become accustomed to are gone instantly and the possessions that have come to define And the Winner - Weds! us such as electronic devices suddenly becomeseless If the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse is too wild a concept for you to grasp you might be relieved that for the most part the zombies are really just part of the background What Max Brooks is really dealing with goes well beyond the concept of zombies and focuses on how people survived the collapse of civilisation He could have Manhattan Heat used microbes or conventional war or a devastating meteorite hitting the earth or any of the other fascinating concepts that people have comep with as ways to end the world It reads like books of a similar nature that collect the stories of people who survived World War Two The scope is huge and impressive Brooks addresses aspects about a zombie apocalypse that I have never thought about before Secrets of the Marriage Bed uislings Yeah you know the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies Ok I ve read a handful of zombie books not enough to make myself an expert but certainly enough to have some background on the lore of a zombie apocalypse WTH Now Brooks didn t just make this termp It is a term from WW2 A The Ruthless Italians Inexperienced Wife uisling is a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force The word originates from the Norwegian war time leader Vidkunisling who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during the Second World War The minds of survivors I m sure snapped in all kinds of strange and wonderful and terrifying ways but Billionaire Baby Dilemma / The Wrangler unfortunately pretending to be a zombie was aick way to find yourselfwelldead First any reasonably sane human who notices you lurching toward them performing your very best mimicry of the ndead will smash your brain Second you don t blend with the zombies They know you are alive You become a zombie delightPeople also just went to sleep perfectly healthy and didn t wake p This was called ADS short for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome It killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger disease interhuman violence or the living dead I ve heard of things like this happening to people who experience long term stress situations The body just reaches a point where the brain decides to just shut down the power to the spacecraft and let the mind drift away RIPPeople will put Redeemed (Redeemed, up with a lot as long as there is hope that someday their situation will improve Babies die when they are not held People die when things become hopeless Brooks also told stories about zombiesnderwater WTH Yeah people reanimated as the living dead on ships and eventually managed to fall off the ship in the water It wasn t Stalker in the Shadows (Sonoma, unusual for zombies to just walk out of the water onto beaches or grab divers or attack fishermen in boats Somehow they are scarynderwater than on land It gives me the shivers just thinking about it I m having a Jaws flashback During and after WWZ people had to relearn things that our grandparents and great grandparents knew A chimney sweep I help keep my neighbors warm he said proudlyA cobbler You see those shoes I made them A shepherd That sweater that s my sheep s wool A gardenerfarmer Like that corn My garden That was the Claiming the Cowboys Heart upshot of a localized system It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear concrete contribution to victory and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that I needed that feeling It kept me sane for the other part of my job The other part of his jobkilling zombies Several of the survivors talked about how important it was not to think of them as people or of who they were or of who they might have become They couldn t see them as people or what they were doing was genocide This is by far the most serious zombie book I ve ever read The stories are compelling This is a panoramic view of a society in crises The observations are thoughtful The writing is convincing By the end I had the feeling I d just read a history book not a speculative zombie apocalyptic book The book isnfilmable but the movie industry knew a catchy title when they saw one They certainly borrowed aspects from the book but really th. N Pegg and members of the casts of Star Trek Battlestar Galactica Heroes and Max Brooks will be reprising his role as The Interviewer The original abridged edition released in 2006 won an Audie Award for Best Multi Voiced Performance Original cast members include Alan Alda Mark Hamill Carl Rob Reiner and John Turturro In this new classic of apocalyptic fiction that feels all too real the Zombie War came Undercover with a SEAL (Code: Warrior SEALs unthinkably close to eradicating humanity The documentary style oral history records the testimony of men women and sometimes children who came face to face with the living or at least thendead hell of that dreadful time Featuring five ho.


E movie should be considered a completely different entity The zombies in Brooks book are the George Romero lurching yucky living dead In the movie they are super charged fast moving aggressive nasty creatures The virus in the movie is fast acting Someone bitten is transformed within seconds In the book the virus takes much longer to take effect Did it bother me that the director Marc Forster took such liberties Not one bite bit I was on the edge of my seat the whole time I was thoroughly entertained I certainly intend to watch the movie again So read the book to discover new depths to an overly exploited genre and watch the movie to experience a whirlwind of fear and dread Just a suggestion have someone else hold the popcorn If you wish to see of my most recent book and movie reviews visit also have a Facebook blogger page at So I ve seen the movie several times when it was on TV and I have to say that I even watched a scene or two a couple of dozen times on Youtube Yes the action and visuals are fantastic Okay except the one where the guy tears his own tooth yuckBut after reading the comments where people were angry at the movie saying that it does not hold a candle to the book I knew I had to read it And yes I do agree that the only things the movie took from the book were the zombies and Israel building a wall Oh and the titleRight away I was very surprised by the format of this book it was not all what I was expecting And the I think about it I believe it would be better if I picked Truth or Dare (Sweet Valley University, up an audiobook instead of a book Yeah shocking I never thought I would say such a thing Every interview is done with a different person so soon I stopped paying attention to their names so when they again appeared later in the book I had a hard time connecting them with their previous chapters Also like one third into the book I got stuck after several boring chapters where I seriously considered DNFing this book but then I pushed through and yes it was worth it I loved that we got to see how so many different parts of the world battled with the zombies The different approaches what do to the countries did they go all savage Did they bomb their own people Did they just lose all control That was fantastic to watchAnd surprisingly this book made me even laugh I just loved the boy who almost missed the zombies because he was focused on his computer I did not expect that That s the one thing you can always depend on as we re fighting on war we re always preparing for the next oneI did not very much grasp how they were suddenly able to fight the zombies when they previously failed with much better euipment but alright But I have to say that zombie cleaning is funny to imagine Especially of thosenderwater I bet it will be fun if a zombie managed to get stuck in the Mariana Trench However the scene I was sort of hoped for was post war when some scientists have a zombie in a lab for studying that would be fantastic I honestly would love to see some experiments on these creatures The book stated that it seemed that the state of the zombies deteriorated but I wonder what would happen if they maybe starved for years So many possibilities What sort of surprised me is that I expected that when the humans would go so close to extinction that the environment would get better no factories running no one is dumping anything in the water etc but it was otherwise and it sort of made sense There had to be so many fires it s terrifying to imagine But I wonder about the impact of all those nukes Secret Refuge (Wings of Danger usedAnd that s another thing I wish was different the last part was sort of jumping from character to character for short conclusions but I would love to see about the brand new world Honestly I think I would be able to read a book dedicated to each country Especially Russia Iceland and Israel would be interesting Also I wish we really knew what happened in North Korea I also wonder about Patient Zero because when the doctor in China informed his friend they knew what was going on the military seemed ready for what was happening there That does not seem like the first caseOverall the book is 355 for me I think I will get the audiobook to see if I ll like that format better This book was initially recommended to me by several people in the office and since I love zombies and apocalyptic themes well I was pretty excited Unfortunately it did not livep to my expectations and I struggled to finish it I m going to write this review Shores Of Love under the assumption that the reader has some inkling about the story and how it s constructedThere are two issues that killed it for me Firstly most of the characters had the same or similar voice Of course this is partly to do with the fact that the voices all originate from the mind of one individual the au I know what you re thinking Five stars for this book Why If you ve been following my reviews then you know I tend to stress over how many stars to give a book and I I just can t get on this bandwagon The pseudo government reports the book is written in handicap it in many ways First there are no protagonists to grow with no story arc no climax etc You know what s going to happen from day one there was a world crisis involving zombies and at least some people live to tell the tale The sure knowledge of the outcome deflates any tension and book feels flacid The pseudo scientific jargon is a poor imitation my sister a nurse tossed aside Brooks other Zombie manfesto in disgust within the first few pages and this one fairs no betterand there are far too many emotional pauses and descriptive introductions for what amounts to an addendum to a government study of events The thing that put me over the edge with this book is the inconsistency one chapter has a boy with bloody knuckles sliding his hands about in zombie goo and remainingninfected and in the next chapter there Update See end of review for movie reviewI ve broken my cardinal rule for reading books just before the movie comes out This rule I ve alluded to is the following I don t read the book directly before the movie at least 1 year before or it must be read after or just wait on the movies The reason for this is that I want to enjoy the story through both mediums and if you read the book just before the movie you ve set yourself p to be a critic analyzing everything and complaining about every detail that s inevitably left out but which is often than not necessary for the mediumIf you read the book at least a year before at least with my shoddy memory the movie becomes a happy time of fond remembrances Oh yeah I remember that part so cool Yay Happy In this instance I hear the movie doesn t ite follow the book exactly and what else can that mean than that it s a typical zombie movie I don t think I ve ruined much hereYou know it could have been partly because of all the hype but I didn t love this book I didn t hate it either which makes these the hardest reviews to write but I think I have a few ideas why World War Z just didn t work all that well for meI m studying for the bar at the moment so you get an extremely well organized review at least with headings aplenty since that s how my brain is thinking at the moment The PlotDoesn t really exist Yeah there s a loose series of events that defines the book or the Zombie War but it s told through interviews with different survivors from different countries And they re short too I even checked this with the book paper form Each interview amounts to a page or two maybe 5 max Each tends to discuss a certain important event which ends The Children of the Mist up getting referred to by characters later in the book and often mentioned by the one directly followingIt s extremely clever and lets you see how well developed this whole idea isIt s extremely cleverMax Brooks has literally thought of everything when it comes to a war against zombies I thought the same in my reading of The Zombie Survival Guide and it goes just as well here EVERYTHINGHe goes into why tanks are all butseless against hordes of zombies because you have to take out their heads Anything else and they ll still shamble and probably even become dangerous when you trip over them on the ground The airforce is just as seless because it s so much money and effort for such a little amount of good Better spent on a bunch of soldiers with tons of amo He even goes into better strategies for fighting this war why the zombies are such a good enemy because they don t need to be bred fed or led as I ll let the book explain Very clever and not even pretentious about it Just captivating And this isn t the only thing I liked although we re getting into the middle ground because I didn t love the audio eitherThe AudioOne of the things that got me excited to listen to this on audio was that it s read by a full cast That means they re trying REALLY hard and that tends to be a good thing especially if you don t like one or two of the voices it s okay it s only temporary With just one narrator that can really kill a book I mentioned that this is told through many different people in different countries and they have actors like Rob Reiner and John Turturro Even Max Brooks himself plays the part of the interviewer John Turturro from The Big LebowskiVery cooluntil the point of distraction There are so many. Urs of previously nrecorded content this full cast recording is read by F Murray Abraham Alan Alda René Auberjonois Becky Ann Baker Dennis Boutsikaris Bruce Boxleitner Max Brooks Nicki Clyne Common Denise Crosby Frank Darabont Dean Edwards Mark Hamill Nathan Fillion Maz Jobrani Frank Kamai Michelle Kholos John McElroy Ade M’Cormack Alfred Molina Parminder Nagra Ajay Naidu Masi Oka Steve Park Kal Penn Simon Pegg Jürgen Prochnow Carl Reiner Rob Reiner Henry Rollins Jeri Ryan Jay O Sanders Martin Scorsese Paul Sorvino David Ogden Stiers Brian Tee John Turturro Eamonn Walker Ric Young and Waleed Zuaiter©2006 Max Brooks P2012 Random House.

Max Brooks is The New York Times bestselling author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z He has been called ”the Studs Terkel of zombie journalism“Brooks is the son of director Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft He is a 1994 graduate of Pitzer College His wife Michelle is a screenwriter and the couple have a son Henry