Reviews

I avoided the film, because I can't take Brad Pitt seriously since "Troy", but I am,so glad I picked up the book!
It's not your typical zombie story.

I'd love to use this in a class to help teach students about the art of story telling and the conventions of non-fiction.

livyalusk's review against another edition

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4.0

After reading this book, I'm pretty sure Max Brooks could tell me anything and I'd believe him.

His passion for the topic shows through because he's clearly thought through every possible scenario to do with the zombie apocalypse. I mean, who considers organ transplants? Astronauts? Brooks did. He's brilliant. The astronauts also served a bigger purpose: drawing back and showing us the world he'd created.

He created a world through a series of seemingly unrelated interviews with few re-occuring characters. That could easily go wrong, but it all seemed so realistic and interesting.

The loss of the fifth star is more a fault of mine. Or two. The first is that I found it very difficult to understand at times, the second is that the fact that there were no central characters that I could follow and get immersed in the world alongside. This doesn't mean that Brooks failed to create a rich narrative, it just means that it isnt the style of writing that draws me specifically into it.

tunafish_'s review

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I expected a more intimate survival-horror book, but I should have taken the full title more literally. The book is kind of a short-story collection, where each chapter we hear from a different survivor from the zombie war. But the perspectives are largely government officials or soldiers or like intelligence agents, and not nearly enough on normal people in my opinion. The focus is much more geo-political.

It kinda reads like reading a podcast, which sounds about as boring as it was. I’ve heard the audiobook is great though.