After slavery was abolished, journalists and aspiring journalists went around the country to interview former slaves and get their stories before it was too late. These oral histories that they gathered created a historically important book to make sure we’d never forget about slavery.
Max Brooks’ World War Z is a just-as-serious though fictional account of the zombie war. Post-war, the narrator travels around the world to document everything that happened from the first outbreak to the post-war clean-up missions. Each chapter is broken up into first-person stories from a survivor. The narrator sometimes asks questions, but usually, people don’t need prompting for the story to just spill out of them.
Despite the fantastical nature of the book, I felt myself becoming immersed in it. If you take into consideration recent events and all of the wars that we’ve been in, a situation like this (sans zombies) of a broken world and broken nations is plausible. I like to think that Brooks meant to also criticize our various countries and human shortsightedness while telling us this fictional story.
If a zombie outbreak ever occurred it makes sense for individuals to have nervous breakdowns and become quidlings. It makes sense that America would think that our arsenal of weaponry would defeat zombies as though it was traditional combat. It was probable that our citizens would listen to the media and try to flee north. I could see all of that happening.
I admire that Brooks did not limit himself to only the United States of America. Instead, he takes us around the world, allowing cultural reactions to become apparent. In one of the vignettes, a Palestinian teenager believes the zombie outbreak to be a trick by the Israelis. That was particularly powerful for me.
This book definitely redefines what “zombie” literature can do. It can go beyond being a book for a specific group and can branch out into being a clever, good book about not just zombies but political and social commentary. I wasn’t expecting this from this book when I first picked it up and let me tell you, it was a wonderfully pleasant surprise.
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Filed under: Literature Reviews, Max Brooks , Ambulothanatophobia, fiction, Literature, Max Brooks, Oral History, World War Z, Zombies
