What Is The World War Z Book'S Chronological Order?

The book is not your typical linear story. It’s set up as a bunch of interviews with people from all over the world, after the Zombie World War. A journalist traveled all over the world talking to different people about their experiences during the war, and Max Brooks put together a book from those interviews. They’re not necessarily in chronological order, but rather by geographic location. So, you read about the initial outbreak, then about the fall of society, then about the human resistance, and finally, the aftermath of the war and how the world was re-built.

The book is structured into three sections of the war. The first part of the war is covered in the section ‘Warnings’. In this section Brooks describes how the early stages of the zombie outbreaks were ignored by governments around the world. The second part of the war is described in the section ‘Blame’. This section covers the cataclysmic fall of civilizations as zombies continue to spread across the globe. The third and final part of the war is covered in the section ‘The Great Panic’. Here Brooks vividly describes how the last remnants of humanity are on the brink of collapse as the last vestiges of society dissolve into chaos. The final part of the book ‘Total War’ describes the counterattack by the last remnants of humanity against their zombie enemies in a desperate bid for survival.

While following a chronology of events can be difficult as many of the interviews are contradictory to one another and are often presented out of chronological order, it makes for a realistic and believable novel. Much like oral histories, novelizations of real-life disasters, etc. Brooks has done a masterful job of utilizing the interviews to reach beyond the ‘mere’ existence of the zombies in the book and explore the many ways that humans are to react to similar situations. A true masterpiece of speculative fiction in that it has successfully managed to make the seemingly impossible to occur seem horribly real.