World War Z: if you should read this book, you probably already have

If anyone claims to like the zombie genre of films or books, then he or she has already read World War Z by Max Brooks. I intended to read the book the summer I spent in St Andrews because some friends and I were going to film a faux-documentary about a post-apocalypse zombie outbreak with our friends acting as survivors. In order to do 'research' for this documentary, I was going to read this book. As it turned out, schoolwork got in the way so that we all forgot about it. Instead of reading The Economist or some detailed political science book before going to bed, I began reading World War Z because it has been on my bookshelf for too long.

The book's narrator has worked with the United Nations after a global zombie outbreak. Originally, his job was to write a report detailing the events of the outbreak for austerity, but the UN didn't want emotional stories detailing the horrors individuals endured. They just wanted raw, detached numbers about the collapse of civilization. The narrator believed that he had to gather the interviews he had collected over the years and write an 'oral history' that showed the human experience during the outbreak. Ergo, this book is a series of interviews going from the doctor who first discovered the outbreak in China, to a soldier who fought in Yonkers, NY in order to stop the outbreak from spreading out of the city, to a girl whose American family fled to Canada but became stuck there without enough food. The book as a whole is an interesting take on what society could do in order to survive a zombie outbreak and what difficulties civilization would have in order to survive. For instance, former movie makers created inspirational propaganda films about heroes surviving under a zombie siege and finally defeating the zombies so that others wouldn't lose hope.

Personally, I'm a little over the zombie genre for now, at least for books. I might enjoy a good zombie movie, though. After getting about 100 pages into this book I was ready for it to be over, but I persevered and finished it. I'm glad I read it so that I know what my friends are talking about when they mention it.