World War Z by Max Brooks

I heard Max Brooks speak at Wizard World Philly a few years ago, and of the first things he said to the assembled crowd was that “If zombies come in that door in the back of the room, it’s every man for himself. I’ve already got my plan for in here ready to go: I’m jumping off this stage, running through the door up here and barricading it so they can’t get me.” We all laughed, but kind of nervously, looking back over our shoulders to make sure there wasn’t a horde of undead flooding into the room.
There’s a great many things about this book that are interesting. It’s a lot like Romero’s films, in that there’s a social commentary element that can’t be missed (although purists would point out that technically, Romero’s “zombies” are actually ghouls, but who listens to purists? Incidentally, it was Return of the Living Dead that gave zombies their hunger for brains.) That’s what zombie stories, the good ones, anyway, are all about: holding a mirror up to the collective face of humanity and showing us what we may not want to see.
Brooks uses zombies as part of an apocalyptic scenario that he drew from historical accounts and extrapolated from his own research. Just like Zombie Survival Guide’s advice, the situations are realistic with or without zombies, though invading armies of people are less fun and maybe easier to deal with.
There were various responses to the outbreak in the book, but the two that interested me the most was the Redeker chapter and the one about the dogs, but for very different reasons.
The Redeker Plan chapter showed that sometimes when people need to go to extremes to survive the apocalypse, even if they save lives by doing something hard and cruel, there's still a high price to pay. This guy was so upset by the plan he'd come up with that it's execution actually drove him insane and made him want to be another person because he couldn't actually live with having come up with it. I was surprised when we learned at the end of the chapter that the person talking about Redeker was actually Redeker himself.
The chapter about the zombie sniffing dogs showed that despite the harshness of the new world that people lived in, some men and women would still value not only human but animal life as well. Despite how much the world had changed, some things didn't.
The zombies in this book serve more as a way to show the reader how the nations of the world and how individual characters will react to their threat, than a monster on their own terms. While I thought this was an effective use, it made them sort of boring as actual opponents, compared to a book like Monster Island by David Wellington, where the undead become much more than a mindless menace. Still, for what Brooks was attempting to do, I think the zombies as presented were effective.
There apparently, is supposed to be a movie coming out, though the script seems to be in rewrite limbo at the moment.
The audio book version is excellent, with many famous people doing the voices for various people in the book. Listening to it adds a level of authenticity that reading just doesn't generate. There's a graphic novel as well, but it only has select stories in it.