World War Z / Max Brooks / 342 pgs

On its surface, World War Z seems like just another entry in the expanding zombie-fiction genre, but underneath, it is actually a sly commentary about the diversity of the world's different cultures and how we all react and deal differently with crisis.

Instead of a central plot, the story is told through a series of vignettes of survivors' stories, ten years after a global zombie epidemic. There is no main character except for the unseen narrator, described as a UN worker who has compiled the series of survivor interviews. His voice is unobtrusive, used minimally, and only serves to move the stories along. Through the interviews, we get individual accounts of how the zombie war transpired from various viewpoints all over the world. We also get insight into how different individuals and governments effectively dealt with, or mismanaged the crisis - from Japan to India, Iceland, Cuba, Russia, Brazil, United States, etc.

The book paces itself nicely by first describing the initial confusion and ignorance about what is happening, then travels through the thick of things when the epidemic is at its worst, then ends with the eventual control of the situation and delves into the various ways society changed and adapted in the aftermath.

The individual stories portray the horrors that people experienced on a personal level, as well as give insight as to how things were dealt with politically and militarily. Through its mode of storytelling, it manages to explore the different ways we react to epic catastrophe on an individual level as well as a collective basis, while also touching upon the fog of war and the confusion that stems from panic and misinformation.

World War Z was an easy read due to its short bursts of rotating stories. The accounts are realistic and have a sense of urgency and dread. The book is definitely a fun read, but it also contains a deceptively subtle subtext about world cultures, the human condition and history.