World War Z

World War Z is a fictional novel by Max Brooks that details a world wide zombie crisis in a convincingly realistic fasion. The book is structured as a series of interviews that detail the progression of the zombie war, which gives it a very non-fiction feel, as if this sort of event had occured in real life. The author, Brooks, is also known as the author of the Zombie Survival Guide. While the Zombie Survival Guide can be considered the humourous and lighthearted side of the coin, World War Z is the darker, more serious and tragic side of the coin. It is not completely without humour, however what humour it has takes the form of irony and situational humour.

I'm currently about half way through the book. It's been a fairly easy, albeit interesting and thoughtful read thus far. I haven't read very much in the past few years, so I've been overdue to sit down and actually read a book for no other reason than pleasure. I think my favorite section thus far has been in the section entitled Home Front USA in which a filmmaker named Roy Elliot uses propagandistic filmmaking to combat ADS (Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, aka Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome), a condition where people simply lose the will to live and die in their sleep. Being an aspiring film student, it resonated with me, one of those testaments to the power and impact that the medium is capable of. It was an insightful detail that I was glad to see incorporated.