World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (4 stars)

I'm a zombie fan, so it was about time I got around to reading this.  I have to admit being largely put-off by the fairly average movie inspired by the book, but I was assured that the book was much better.  It definitely is.  In fact, they could have stuck closer to the book and made a much more interesting movie.

Brooks has put a considerable amount of thought into many aspects of the world's military and political reaction to a zombie apocalypse.  I was fascinated by the catastrophic failure of traditional military weapons and tactics in the face of an enemy completely without fear at the battle of Yonkers.

But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't?

Troops with high-tech "Land Warrior" network centric communications and satellite imagery, a key strategic advantage in normal warfare, were quickly demoralized and running in fear after getting detailed images of the horde and seeing their friends eaten on live video uplinks.  Tanks, artillery, air-craft, navy, the jewels of a modern military were all very expensive and very inefficient ways to kill Zombies.  Eventually all of this is supplanted by far more efficient simple rifles and simple hand-to-hand weapons.

My 2c on zombie eradication.  At the point where they were rounding up zombies to send them towards highly efficient sniper emplacements I thought they should have been using a mobile slaughterhouse corral and pneumatic bolts to destroy the brain.  A lot more automated, cheap, and less prone to mistakes than snipers.  Similarly for the underwater zombies problem, nets and a floating slaughterhouse would work the same way.

I liked that the interviews spanned a large time period, so we got a birds eye view of the whole history of the war.  Particularly interesting was the period after the humans carve out some viable territory and need to re-organise all of society for war and reconstruction.

The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation.

This is totally me, useless after the zombie apocalypse.  Well, perhaps not completely useless if computer communications are still a thing, but certainly no civil engineer or carpenter.  You can imagine this doesn't exactly sit well with everyone:

The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That's the way the world works. But one day it doesn't. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

The idea of Quislings, living people who act like zombies out of some Stockholm-Syndrome-like impulse, was fantastically imagined.

This novel is really quite a strange format.  It's basically a series of short stories, so you don't spend much time with any of the characters.  It's part academic paper, part military after action report, and part touching personal news reporting, all about a very fictional subject.  At times it is powerful and almost inspirational:

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope. 

This novel probably appeals most to people who have spent considerable amounts of time pondering what the best zombie survival strategies are, what weapons are most effective and durable, and generally how you would survive this invented apocalypse.

4 stars.