Second Quarter Outside Reading Project

World War Z brings the history of the Zombie War alive

World War Z by Max Brooks. Three Rivers Press, 2006. Genre: Fiction

Max Brooks (author of the book) is the protagonist and acts as the reporter who interviews survivors from the zombie pandemic. World War Z takes place 12 years after the Zombie war has ended. In these accounts there are detailed descriptions of when people heard about some of the first outbreaks to the Great Panic and how people had to survive until the outbreak was under control. The people who tell their stories range from doctors to soldiers to people who were just a child. In the pages of this book you hear about the struggle and how hard it was to survive the Zombie War.

“ Posses more creativity and zip than entire crates of other fiction titles. Think Mad Max meets The Hot Zone... It’s Apocalypse Now, pandemic- style. Creepy but fascinating” says ,USA Today about World War Z.

I have not read other books by Max Brooks , but I think that he writes very uniquely. Whenever I read this book I felt like this sounds like a real interview and I have not read anything written in an interview format before. This book reminds me of the book The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch. The Eleventh Plague is similar to World War Z because it tells how a teenager survives a terrible plague that has killed more than half of the people in North America. In both of these books they tell of the survival of people during and after the terrible flu outbreak. I thought that how people survive while the living dead pandemic is happening and how the people are forced to survive in North America after the flu are similar to each other. In both books people have to abandon their homes and only take things that are necessary to them. Lastly, people setup their own camps and don’t get along very well with other survivors.

“ I came up spluttering, choking, and the first thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me” (pg. 182) .

Ever since I saw my first zombie movie I have always been fascinated with zombies. I love how they are so creepy and yet even though they might not be thought of as a tough creature since they don’t have unbelievable strength, they are very hard to get rid of because they can only be killed if their brain is destroyed. I thought that this book did a really good job of showing the struggle of dealing with a zombie pandemic to life really well.

World War Z is 5 paws- Devour it.