Medical Anthropology! ...oh and I guess zombies too (World War Z)

First of all, let me say props to this small Youtuber I found trying to do voice acting. This playlist made the voices of the different chapters even more memorable.

The book, while being about zombies, was more so a story on humans, our ability to cope (and hide) tragedy, quell panic, how societies interact and how the government involves itself. And despite the zombies, this also wasn’t a horror book to me. This was a commentary on mankind being the monsters more than it was a terrifying undead book.

Here, we see people spanning multiple locations around the world, and how the cultures handle the pandemic differently. The bigger issue than the zombies in this book were the surviving humans undermining one another. The whole books was brimming with political and personal agendas of unreliable narrators, and yet that’s what made it so good. The story pieced into interviews worked for me. It helped break up the story into palatable chunks, and worked much better than telling everything from the biased POV of one character only. Needless to say though, this books is about human reaction and interaction, not the undead. This book actually gave me Jurassic Park vibes, as weird as that is to say. It felt like the world was ignoring the threat or assuming they could keep it contained.

Now, I don’t remember a single character name, but I remember stories. It may be because I listened to the book rather than read it, but the character voices were so distinct. Thos voices are what got me through the book. I clearly remember the doctor with patient zero, the man smuggling in organs across borders, the greedy guy making money off false vaccination hope, the woman in the hospital with the mental state of a young child. All of them were different, and (almost) all of them were interesting.

However, I have to agree with Sean that the story being told in the past tense did ruin the tension. We knew all the people being interviewed survived. these drawbacks in tense drew me back from really enjoying this story. And the fact that the zombies weren’t as prevalent as I wanted them to be. This book was about humans, and I was let down by that, going in expecting more. The book did eventually become monotonous with tales of everyone dying and then the survivors finding a way to live high above and survive. It’s about human resilience, and readers always eat that up because they like seeing the person they emphasize with win in the end. But I say again, I can’t remember a single character name, so it’s hard to relate to characters. Not only that, but a lot of the character I felt like we weren’t supposed to like, and that’s why I enjoyed them. A good bad villain is hard to not love.

In the end, I have already recommended this to my sister, who at one point wanted to be an epidemiologist, but is now a medical anthropologist.