World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks is an incredibly complex and well written documentary style novel of the outbreak of the undead throughout the world. It follows the writer as he documents first person accounts of the Zombie uprising. Told in vignettes, Brooks tells the story of the outbreak, the war and the human reaction and toll.
Brooks begins with explaining how the book came to be. His work with the United Nations Postwar Commission and how his work was considered too intimate to be part of a report but would instead be better served as a book. A memorial of the human stories that made up the war.

...The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor...

Believed to have begun in China, the infected traveled across the globe quickly. Transported by roads, water and air. The dead re-animated everywhere. Governments and people were slow to react. Who could believe that the nightmare they only dreamed about could actually be happening. It was not only by bite that the contagion was spread, but by body parts used in transplants. Soon, every country on Earth was being invaded by an army of undead. Zacks they were called.
Armies responded with their sophisticated weapons only to find that all their technology had little effect. What good did it do to burn or blow the Zacks apart when they would just keep coming. Only a shot to the head, destroying the brain, had any effect. They couldn't be drowned either as the world soon found out. They would either float or sink to the bottom. Waiting for something to come into their grasp. Great container ships drifted on the oceans full of the undead searching for somewhere to put ashore.
But it is the human stories that take center stage here. Not the tales of the undead. Human stories of triumph and despair. Of bravery and cowardice. Of greed and humanity. Humans who learned for once, that they were not the dominant species on the planet.
There is a young computer nerd who refuses to leave his room and cannot socialize with the outside world until he hears the hands of the undead pounding at his door. The blind man who is treated all his life as someone who cannot care for himself but finds that without sight he cannot see the undead. But he can hear them and with lethal efficiency becomes a samurai warrior killing all the Zombies he can. The submarine Captain who takes his crew and their families to the safety of the deep water only to find something waiting for him on the ocean floor.

...I was standing by the sonar shack, my eyes on the overhead, when Lieutenant Liu tapped me on the shoulder. He had something on our hull-mounted array, not the other sub, something closer all around us. I plugged in a pair of headphones and heard a scraping noise, like scratching rats. I silently motioned for the captain to listen. We couldn't make it out. It wasn't bottom flow, the current was too mild for that. If it was sea life, crabs or some other biologic contact, there would have to be thousands of them. I began to suspect something...I requested a scope observation, knowing the transient noise might alert our hunter. The captain agreed. We gritted our teeth as the tube slid upward. Then, the image.
Zombies, hundreds of them, were swarming over the hull. More were arriving each second, stumbling across the barren sand, climbing over each other to claw, scrape, actually bite the Zheng's steel...

World War Z is an ambitious undertaking and well worth the read. The style may put some readers off but I for one enjoyed it. A fresh perspective on the war, its aftermath and eventual recovering by the human race.
Max Brooks has created a novel that all other Zombie tales need to be measured by.