World War Z

This book is really a sister book to the Zombie Survival Guide, not a sequel. They are both written by Max Brooks but have completely different styles of writing. World War Z is a collection of short stories that can stand alone but work well built on each other to create a time line of the Zombie War.
There is a ten episode podcast available for free on iTunes that offers entire short stories extracted out of the book. I listened to them before I listened to the WWZ audiobook. They are very entertaining but there is some stuff in there that just goes sort of in-one-ear-out-the-other since you are listening to the stories out of sequence. As I listened to the stories again in the audiobook I found myself thinking, "ah, that makes more sense or ah, that seems to have more meaning".
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I was thinking how if you removed the zombie element, kept everything else the same, just exchanged the undead for some kind of lethal virus that was killing everyone on the planet, this would be one of the scariest end-of-the-world books out there. This book sucked me in. It is performed incredibly well by an impressive cast of actors. Whoever cast the readers of this book is a genius. They picked the perfect actors for each of the stories. One of my favorites was none other than Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. His voice fits his character perfectly. After years of doing characters for animation Hamill is an old pro.
The other familiar voice I enjoyed was Alan Alda. His character, to me, seemed as if Hawkeye Pierce from Mash had gone on to work a government job after the war. The character is played with a been-there-done-that-seen-it-survived-it tone.

WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a recounting of these apocalyptic and horrifying years that will make sure we never forget how close we came to total annihilation. Told from the perspective of numerous survivors from all over the world, from Denver to South Africa, Sydney to Yonkers, Malibu to India, WORLD WAR Z captures the sacrifices and, toward the end, the ingenuity of our race to defend and save our cities, towns, and villages from a plague that seemed virtually impossible to stop.
Brooks tells a moving story of courage and survival and gives us insight into the key military strategies that helped us take our world back. To this day, controversy and conversation still revolves around some key issues that WORLD WAR Z addresses such as:

- How the Walking Plague was initially covered up by corrupt governments
- Why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services downplayed the Great Panic
- A zealous American President's mistake in putting his party's needs in an election year ahead of the safety of his people.

I wish there was an unabridged version of the audiobook.