World War Z by Max Brooks

Ah, the great Zombie War. The plague that infected the entire earth...

Brooks weaves a remarkable tale of the days following the "Great Plague", when an unknown viral outbreak causes the dead to...stop being dead. Zombies, those slow-shuffling, brain-eating, nightmare creatures, overrun the world in numbers too large to control, leaving humanity to seek shelter and fight back.

The accounts span the globe, from Asia to India, the United States to Russia, Antarctica, the ocean floors...you name it, no place is safe. Monster tales like this are little better than popcorn movies at face value. Brooks, however, makes some important sociological and political examinations of our world and its flaws. What kind of government oversight led to the disease spreading so rapidly? What short-sighted bureaucracies helped fan the flames? Brooks plays deftly with the imagination, examining the depths of human depravity and the triumph of the human spirit. This isn't a typical rah-rah-America saves the day survival tale. It's about what kinds of things the people of the world must do, right or wrong, to ensure their own survival. What steps could have been avoided? What horrors were necessary? It's a gripping page turner, one that will keep you reading late into the night...and awake for hours afterwards.