World War Z

[Merentha]

Too add to that, once paramedics start hearing (and paramedics are gossipy as fuck) that patients are biting, they're going to be really damned careful about the symptoms. Being bit is scary and entails a lot of paperwork now. Once they put "Johnny got bit and then Johnny got sick" together, they're going to be really on the alert. I buy hospitals being the spread of infection from people wandering into ERs, not from medics bringing in newly risen dead.

Also, medics are a lot quicker to fight with their patients than nurses tend to be.

edit: I think the outbreak works if the newly risen dead are fast zombies and slow down over time. By Yonkers, its plausible that most of the horde are shamblers, while the Panic is caused by fast zombies coupled with generalized shooting of everyone who looks violent.

[Spring Bass]

I'm through most of the "Blame" section, and the satirical element is much more noticeable. The pre-Colin Powell Administration is pretty much the excesses of the Bush Administration turned up to eleven, including neglecting to provide support to the urban ghettoes where local law enforcement was begging for help (and where the refugee-caused outbreaks were occuring), deliberate promotion of Phalanx even though they knew it was nothing but a placebo, and super-corrupt suppression of the Warnbraum-Knight Report. I'll change my position, and say that I don't think it could realistically happen without the satirical exaggerations. Even the Bush Administration wasn't that bad in real life - they did provide support to Katrina victims . . . eventually (after the multi-day foul-ups under Michael Brown).

And, of course, the news is heavily satirized, with Real Americans ignoring those eggheads on NPR and briefly paying attention to news about "African rabies" and outbreaks in the ghettoes before going back to their complacent lives.

So basically, it's exaggerated, but I think Brooks throws enough realism and interesting information in there so that it doesn't completely crack verisimilitude in most of the chapters. The threshold for that is going to be different for different people. I thought Yonkers basically worked even though Brooks gets the weapons physics wrong and has literally everything go wrong, but I was never able to take the Russian chapters without laughing at how over-the-top they are.

I just wish Brooks had a chapter about trains. Damn if that wouldn't be an awesome image: the midnight train through zombie-land.

This requires assuming that people are so stupid that they won't do anything, or contact any authorities, when someone is going around biting that entire building. It assumes that neither the people nor the authorities can read things on the net, listen to the news, or read the papers. It requires a mind-boggling level of naivete and stupidity, which is even more mind-boggling when you consider that knowledge of the zombie phenomenon was confimed because of the Phalanx vaccine. The fact is that the first time someone bites a neighbor to that degree, the cops will get called. A few of those incidents, and it now is a known problem that can be easily handled by armed cops/citizens who will vastly outnumber the number of people who have actually turned.

The impression I've gotten after re-reading the "Warnings" and "Blame" sections is that most Americans never even saw zombies right up until the Great Panic . . and possibly well into it. Jesika Hendricks mentions that the only time they saw zombies in their neighborhood before fleeing north was a group of six that showed up nearly four months into the Great Panic, and which were quickly put down by the police. The outbreaks seem to have been mostly confined to urban ghettoes and other poor areas where infected refugees showed up, and the cops kept a lid on the situation for a considerable amount of time (the Karl Rove Grover Carlson chapter mentions that a year passed before the winter before the Great Panic, during which time the US federal government's only response to zombie outbreaks was Alpha Teams and instructional videos to law enforcement, along with active suppression of reports about the outbreaks).

[AncalagonTheBlack]

WORLD WAR Z, THE BESTSELLING ZOMBIE APOCOLYPSE NOVEL, NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EXTENDED AUDIOBOOK WITH A CELEBRITY-FILLED CAST :

The Random House Audio Publishing Group announces the star-studded cast of WORLD WAR Z: THE COMPLETE EDITION, a new recording of Max Brooks’ bestselling novel, on sale May 14, 2013.

Brooks worked with Random House Audio’s production team to cast 21 additional Hollywood A-list actors and sci-fi fan favorites to record the stories not included in the original edition. With five more hours of previously unrecorded content, fans finally have a chance to own the whole story.

New narrators include Academy Award®-winning director, Martin Scorsese, Spiderman star Alfred Molina, The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont, rapper Common, Firefly star Nathan Fillion, Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg, and members of the casts of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes and more! Brooks will be reprising his role as The Interviewer.

Full cast listed below in alphabetical order by character last name:

Nicki Clyne as Sharon

Bruce Boxleitner as Gavin Blaire

Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson

Brian Tee as Hyungchoi and Michael Choi

Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins

Frank Darabont as Roy Elliot

Common as Darnell Hackworth

Kal Penn as Sardar Khan

Alfred Molina as Terry Knox

David Ogden Stiers as Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk

Nathan Fillion as Stanley MacDonald

Denise Crosby as Mary Jo Miller

Ade M’Cormack as Jacob Nyathi

Paul Sorvino as Fernando Oliveira

Parminder Nagra as Barati Palshigar

Rene Auberjonois as Andre Renard

F. Murray Abraham as Father Sergei Ryzhkov

Martin Scorsese as Breckinridge “Breck” Scott

Masi Oka as Kondo Tatsumi

Ric Young as Admiral Xu Zhicai

Jeri Ryan as Maria Zhuganova

http://www.randomhou...mplete-edition/

[Isalie]

I wish this had been available half a year ago or whenever I listened to it, the abridged version really didn't do it for me so good news I guess.

[scotcat]

As someone who has only read the book this audio book interests me - especially if it isn't the abridged version.

[Stark Revenge]

This was a great book! I loved it!