Book Review - World War Z

Hi folks. Just finished up World War Z by Max Brooks. Overall I was very surprised at how good this book is. I was expecting a book written for teenage boys with lots of gore and shock value that all 16-year-olds love. What I got was a very intelligent book whose premise is how will the world react and change during and after a world-wide zombie epidemic. The style of the book is intriguing too. It is written like an NPR interview. The "author", the main character, travels the world and interviews folks who had played a small or large part of the zombie war from the very beginning to the end. World War Z takes the reader to places like China, Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, South Africa, just to name a few places to meet these characters. All of these people happen to have been in places where the major events of the World War took place and give there perspective on those events. Brooks takes care to give all of these interviewees a sense of character, purpose and tries, altough he comes up short in places, to make these people representative of their countries and cultures. My favorite part was the whole what-if nature of the book. What would happen if the dead came to life? What would people do? What would governments do? Brooks answers all of these questions himself although I kept asking myself what would happen? What would I do? Would I survive or would I freak out? This book must have been a blast to write because it was a blast to read. I highly recommend this book if you like zombies, survival horror, apocolyptic-the-end-is-nigh stuff.

Now, what to read next? Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Upgrade Your Life, John Scalzi's Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, or Michael Crichton's Next.