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Recently, I had a conversation with someone about how awesome the movie World War Z is, which led me to explain how different the book was. This made me revisit Max Brooks’ novel about the zombie apocalypse the Brad Pitt movie was based on.

The book follows the narrator who travels the world collecting stories of the survivors of the zombie attack that nearly wiped out humanity forever. Dozens of characters share their experiences at different stages of the zombie outbreak. The book is divided into eight sections: Warnings, Blame, The Great Panic, Turning the Tide, Home Front USA, Around the World and Above, Total War and Good-byes. Each section features different characters.

In one sense, this is cool because the reader gets such a variety of stories from around the globe. If there’s a character or story one wasn’t interested in, they’re never seen again. Then again, if you were intrigued by someone’s survival story, there was no follow through to find out what happened to them later on. A couple characters did show up in more than one section, but because there were so many people in the novel, it was hard to remember who’d been in it before when they showed up again.

Essentially, World War Z is a series of vignettes, some excellent and some not as great. I was particularly touched by a man who lived out the war in Windsor Castle and spoke of the queen, who refused to leave and go into safety. Another story focused on a dog handler who trained tiny dachshunds to sniff out zombies. Another really cool one was about a blind survivor from the atomic bombs in Japan who lived out the war in a state park and used his other senses to fight zombies. I was glad to see his story revisited at the end.

The one character that is mentioned the most is Todd Wainio, an American soldier fighting zombies throughout the book. He appears in four sections, which makes him a standout character and one I was glad to keep revisiting.

The lack of a central character is the book’s biggest failing. At first, I was intrigued by all the stories from around the world, but ultimately, this also made the book lose momentum and made it hard to care about the story overall. When adapting the novel for a movie, the writers were wise to build the script around Brad Pitt’s character and his family.

Two points in particular really stood out. One was the so called Redeker Plan, an idea developed by an ex-apartheid government official in South Africa. According to the plan, the government, military and a select group of people were secured in a safe zone, while the majority of the population were left outside the secure area to be living targets for zombies. Most of the world ended up adopting that plan, including America, which is a very scary thought.

Max Brooks also slips in commentary about immigration. America’s immigrants became the saviors of society in the book. In California, the wealthy white collar people had no idea how to labor to survive, so the immigrants end up rebuilding society and teaching the 1 percent how to live.

Brooks also works in criticism of the government and corporations, and American isolationism. America is not the big hero in the novel. Brooks was inspired by the history of each country and used that to determine who would come out ahead in an apocalyptic situation. The major theme, of course, is that the world needs to work together in order to survive as a species.

If you’ve seen the movie World War Z (which is a super cool flick, by the way), the book is very different. There’s definitely some aspects of it that are really well done, but overall, it was a slower read for me because of the lack of a central character. There was no one to emotionally tie the book together. I did use World War Z to teach an elective on zombie. Rather than have kids read the entire book, I let them pick the stories they wanted to focus on and we treated it as more of a short story collection than a novel. If you read it from that perspective, it might be more enjoyable.

There’s a plethora of fantastic apocalypse novels out there, from The Walking Dead comics to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. While World War Z is an interesting addition to the apocalypse genre, it wouldn’t be my first choice of one to read.

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By Dorothy Sasso

On the Books

World War Z

Author: Max Brooks

Page Number: 342

Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Rating:♦♦♦

Dorothy Sasso is a former Soap Opera Digest writer and a private school teacher. She is busy reading books and raising her daughter.