To be honest, I am not sure how to start this review. If you checked the Goodreads rate, you will know why I am like in the middle (ha!)…
I know how to start!
This is just not like the movie at all. I am not saying that I didn’t like the movie because I always have to put everything aside to watch it when I find it on FOX. There are a few events on the movie that happened in the book. However, I will not judge the movie for its book (Ha!)
I think I will start with the style and the format of the book. The fact that the book is narrated/written like interviews, people narrating their struggles, their fights, and how they crashed against the Great Panic, made it mesmerizing. Why? Because you are being told their “experience”. It gives this kind of perspective that you can’t get from one single narrator.
I must accept that I got excited a few times… (More than a few) reading how the Great Panic was a common and single trait on all of the voices of the book, but they all lived the war differently. I will summarize “World War Z” as a compilation of mini/short stories. Having so many people talking about the same issue in different scenarios gives a more open view to cover a world war, and even though this is the case, there are gaps in what and why all this and that happened. I see that as a reflection of this reality because our questions are not fully answered all the time, and nobody has all the answers and the absolute truth.
There were narrators that really got my attention. It was amazing how they survived the war. How they literally fought their way through hell and managed to become legends and heroes of a fictitious war that criticize politicians, pharmaceutical companies, society, religion, and a whole system that has been put in place just to destroy the same human race.
What I didn’t enjoy that much is its heaviness. It is so packed with real and fictitious facts that makes it a little too hard to tie up all the strings together. What follows might be just my own problem as I am not that good in geography, but the main and constant narrator or the interviewer moves around different towns, cities, countries to gather these stories. He vaguely mentions the place where they are and starts the anecdote like if all the readers knew all those places. If I had stopped in every single story to google all those places, I would still be on the first hundred pages…
I am not saying that the setting was weak, but it could have been better in the description and creating the mood for the actual narration.
I’ve read extracts of books where the author does a playlist of music for the reader to listen while reading or some shi… like that which I just find annoying. However, during the war, some of these survivors/soldiers tell how the head ups increased the soldier’s morale and stamina while playing heavy metal music. I found this device as an assistant to set the mood, like extra help for the author. It wasn’t on every single story, but on the ones that it mentioned a song, it perfectly matched the emotion and the desperation of the characters.
The purpose of the sci-fi genre is basically to criticize them now in the future. “World War Z” can be easily analyzed with the ecofeminism approach. I can picture the time on the book not that far from now. I might be a few years from when it was written or from today. However, the problems that are denounced include space junk, the killing of the whales, the extinction of the fauna and flora, and the resource depletion. Also, I found really amazing how Brooks denounces and describes the politicians and pharmaceutical companies as soulless entities. Why? Because they only care about making the profit out of the people sickness, pains, and desperation. The use of hope as a tool to manipulate the masses is so well known and also so overlooked that humanity fails to react to the heads up manipulation resources.
Another reason why I selected 3 stars instead of 4 is that the book is after a war and the zombies are not actually mentioned. This book becomes more like a political discourse which I find really interesting, but some zombies and some horror would have been amazingly lovely.
Humanity is just not a simple species, and we will find our end at some point. It might be either by a nuclear war, complete annihilation of the planet, or even some grey rotten ghouls.
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