Book review: World War Z

Brooks chose an interesting form for this novel. Inspired by Studs Terkel's oral histories, the novel is written as a series of interviews taken long after a global disaster, a plague of virus-created zombies that overruns all of the continents (except for Antarctica -- zombies freeze solid). The book is broken into several sections: the initial outbreak and dispersal over all of Asia and then the world; the Great Panic when people try to flee the cities, get stuck in traffic jams, and are massacred by zombies; the retreat into small enclaves (islands, cold territories, castles, natural fortresses); the planning for a massive zombie-clearing effort; the course of the war; and the aftermath. The accounts are blackly comic, horrifying, and sometimes even moving; the account of the ISS captain and crew, trapped in space for years, is a tour de force. I began picturing the text as an Errol Morris documentary, with the speaker looking directly into the camera, stock footage and a gloomy Philip Glass score. An utterly addictive read.