Book Name : World
War Z
Author
: Brooks, Max
No. of Pages
: 374
Summary :
(Taken from Wikipedia)
Through a series of oral interviews, Brooks, as an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, describes the history of 'World War Z'. Although the origin of the zombie pandemic is unknown, the story begins in China after a zombie bites a young boy, who becomes the pandemic's 'patient zero'. The Chinese government attempts to contain the infection and concocts a crisis involving Taiwan to mask their activities. The infection is spread to other countries by the black marketorgan trade and by refugees, before an outbreak in South Africa finally brings the plague to public attention.
As the infection spreads, only Israel initiates a nationwide quarantine and closes its borders to all but uninfected Jews and Palestinians. Pakistan and Iran destroy each other in a nuclear war after Iran attempts to stem the flow of refugees from Pakistan. The United States of America does little to prepare; although special forces teams are used to contain initial outbreaks, a widespread effort never starts as the nation is sapped of political will by several "brushfire wars", and a placebo fraudulently marketed as a vaccine has created a false sense of security. When the world recognizes the true scope of the problem, a period known as the "Great Panic" begins. Following the fall of New York City, the United States Army sets up a high-profile defense at Yonkers, New York to restore American morale. The military uses Cold War tactics on the zombies, including weapons intended to disable vehicles and demoralization through wounding. These have no effect on the zombies, which have no self-preservation instincts and can only be stopped if shot in the head and killed. The soldiers are routed on live television, while other countries suffer similarly disastrous defeats, and human civilization teeters on the brink of collapse.
In South Africa, the government adopts a plan drafted by ex-apartheid government official Paul Redeker, which calls for the establishment of small "safe zones", areas surrounded by natural boundaries and cleared of zombies. Large groups of refugees are abandoned, but kept alive outside the safe zones to distract the hordes of undead, allowing those within time to regroup and recuperate. Governments worldwide adopt their own versions of the "Redeker Plan", or relocate the populace to safer foreign territory, such as the complete evacuation of the Japanese Home Islands. As zombies freeze solid in the cold, many civilians in North America flee to the wilds of northern Canada and the Arctic where 11 million people die from starvation and exposure.
During a conference near Honolulu aboard the USS Saratoga, seven years after the pandemic starts, most of the world's leaders indicate they want to wait out the zombie plague, but the United States President successfully argues that the only way to survive physically and psychologically is to go on the offensive. Determined to lead by example, the United States military reinvents itself to meet the specific challenges involved in fighting the living dead: automatic weapons and mobility are replaced by semi-automatic rifles and formation firing, troops are retrained to focus on head shots and slow, steady rates of fire, and a multipurpose hand tool, the "Lobotomizer" or "Lobo", is designed to destroy zombie heads close up. In two north–south lines stretching across North America, the military leaves its safe zone west of the Rocky Mountains and crosses the continent in a three-year campaign, systematically destroying the zombies and reclaiming outposts of survivors (whether they want to be reclaimed or not).
Ten years after the "official" end of the zombie war, millions of zombies are still active and the geopolitical landscape of the Earth has been transformed. A democratic Cuba has become the world's most thriving economy and the international banking capital. China has also become a democracy, following a civil war sparked by the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam and ended after a Chinese submarine destroys the Communist leadership with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Tibet, freed from Chinese rule, hosts the world's most populated city. Following a religious revolution, Russia is now an expansionist theocracy. North Korea is completely empty, with the entire population presumed to have disappeared into underground bunkers; it is unknown if they survived or have become zombies. Iceland has been completely depopulated, and is the world's most heavily infested country. The United Nations fields a large military force to eliminate the remaining zombies from overrun areas, defeat hordes that surface from the ocean floor, and kill frozen zombies before they thaw. Overall, there is a drastic reduction in the human population, which is alluded to have been brought to the brink of extinction, and many environments and animal species have been devastated, as much by desperate humans as by marauding zombies.
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