Book 3: World War Z - Max Brooks

In World War Z, an Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks uses interviews with people around the world to give a hollistic account of the Zombie War that plagued the earth. Max Brooks brings together a variety of perspectives to provide interesting social commentary pertaining to many facets of human society. This book is very scary.

At first, I was convinced that Brooks single-handedly predicted swine flu and the subsequent public and governmental reaction to it - the greedy businessman who created a vaccine that didn't work to make money, the government's perspective to calm people down and maintain crowd control, people panicking due to uncertainty. In the process, through the combined efforts of the government and health department, a useless placebo drug claiming to be a vaccine gets administered to society even before anyone has an understanding of the Zombie Epidemic itself and knowing full well that it does not work. Sounds a little like swine flu and it's corresponding vaccine, doesn't it? How timely. On the cover of the November 2009 The Atlantic it reads, "SWINE FLU: DOES THE VACCINE REALLY WORK?" Scary. Then, as I kept reading, I was convinced that Brooks had a full understanding of the AIDS epidemic - prejudice and extermination for fear of the disease spreading, knowingly infecting people, and creating a vaccine to maximize profit instead of pursuing a cure, just to list a few things.

Then, it occurred to me. What makes this book so scary isn't swine flu nor is it AIDS, what makes this book so scary is that the Zombie War applies to every crisis and epidemic in modern human history. Max Brooks make you realize through these accounts that human nature is relatively constant, and while new incidents may arise, they all boil down to the same thing because we collectively react to them in the same way.
That's the only thing I got out of this book.

The book is clearly well-researched and definitely well-thought out. Max Brooks brings forth an understanding of World History, Current Events, and Global Politics. It was almost as if he was summarizing any History, Political Science, International Relations, students' college career. He doesn't go in depth into any particular world event, instead he gives you a taste of the multi-layered, interdependent global network, all while remaining arguably U.S. centric. I was also very surprised in the intricate details he used. For example, he mentioned the Revolutionary Guards, the Saw Mill Parkway, and the Ossetian ethnic minority. How many people know about the South Ossetians? I thought that was incredible random and respectable.

I thought this book was intriguing, but I didn't love it. It's sad because this book rests on an interesting premise and has the potential to be a GREAT book. Regrettably, the premise of this book is a lot stronger than its writing. The greatest weakness of this book which should have been its great strength had to do with the different perspectives. Different perspectives would normally keep me interested and entertained. However, every interview had the same exact voice, and that made this book utterly boring. Up to the first half, it grabbed my attention because through every perspective you learned a little more about the Zombie war. But once you got the full picture, it was just the same thing over and over - same voice, different event. It was a struggle to finish.