Plot summary "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a fictional eccentric 20th-century French writer and blogger.com begins with a brief introduction and a listing of Menard's work. Borges' "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so Sep 27, · Look for these essay collections, an exploration of the Marvel Comics universe and more. Get to know your favorite actors and artists with these titles. Six new books take up the pandemic, #MeToo Dec 23, · It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, its
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks | Goodreads
Audie Awarddistant star bolano essay, Multi-Voiced PerformancePremio Ignotus Nominee, distant star bolano essay, Mejor novela extranjera Best Foreign NovelLincoln Award NomineeSeiun Award 星雲賞 Nominee, Best Translated Long FormWant to Read. Rate this distant star bolano essay. World War Z World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War Max Brooks. The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.
He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time, distant star bolano essay. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that distant star bolano essay powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Distant star bolano essay provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the distant star bolano essay raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr.
Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us distant star bolano essay the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?
Science Fiction. Post Apocalyptic. Original Title World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Series World War Z. Characters ZombiesKwang Jing-shuNury TelevaldiStanley MacDonaldTodd WainioMaria ZhuganovaJesika HendricksJoe MuhammadThis edition Format pages, Hardcover.
Published September 12, by Crown. ISBN ISBN Language English. More details. Max Brooks 80 books 6, followers. Max Brooks is The New York Times bestselling author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z.
He is a graduate of Pitzer College. His wife, Michelle, is a screenwriter, and the couple have a son, Henry. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 10 of 26, distant star bolano essay, reviews. This book was initially recommended to me by several people in the office and since I love zombies and apocalyptic themes, well, I was pretty excited.
Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations and I struggled to finish it. I'm going to write this review under the assumption that the reader has some inkling about the story and how it's constructed.
There are two issues that killed it for me. Firstly, most of the characters had the same--or similar--voice, distant star bolano essay.
Of course this is partly to do with the fact that the voices all originate from the mind of one individual, the author. Q and A is inherently dry, no matter how exciting the events described are intended to be. This is a minor gripe, though, and one that can be lived with. A more serious complaint, however, is that this book can be seen as completely lacking any and all dramatic tension that a person or, me expects from a survival horror-themed story.
The primary draw--the zombie war and how humanity survived--is such a compelling hook, but it's told by the people who survived. As in, past tense, distant star bolano essay, as in we are left with their impressions of things that happened to them.
Basically, distant star bolano essay, then, the story devolves into an excercise in basic exposition: "And then this happened, and then that happened.
It seems to me like an extraordinarily easy maybe even lazy way to tell a story. One other minor point: For me, accounts of survival when the victims are real have meaning that allows them to transcend the limitations described above.
WW2 Holocaust survivors' accounts, distant star bolano essay, for example, can take your breath away. The difference is, of course, that they were real events that happened to real people.
Since all the classic storytelling elements are dispensed with, we're basically left with the author's views on our current world, distant star bolano essay, particularly and naturally, distant star bolano essay, the wars and our culture s. However, it's my view that there are dozens of books written about these subjects already; books that haven't needed to sex the discussion up with a horde of shambling undead, distant star bolano essay. So, in summary, if I'm going to read an apocalyptic recounting of the end of civilization as we know it, I want to read about people in real time, struggling to survive, not being told how people surivived after it was over.
I realize, though, that it's all a matter of taste, as I know half a dozen people whose views I respect that absolutely loved this book. Jason Pettus. Author 10 books 1, followers. My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations; find distant star bolano essay entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter, distant star bolano essay.
Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst; because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to find, an endless series distant star bolano essay fluffy pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point-of-purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether.
And so it's been in the last six months as I've heard more and more about this book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Warwhich supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it; even worse, that it had distant star bolano essay inspired by an actual gimmicky point-of-purchase humor book, distant star bolano essay, the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the early s.
And even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks; and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky point-of-purchase humor books, the chances usually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say.
So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and astute look at the next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand-in for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an international culture these days terrorism, distant star bolano essay, global warming, disease, natural disastersshowing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises.
It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as "real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way; and even more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of third-world countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or European ever could be.
Oh distant star bolano essay, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I mention the face-eating zombies? Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects, distant star bolano essay, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at Saturday Night Live from to '03; that no matter how smart World War Z gets and it gets awfully smart at pointsit is still ultimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote third-world villages.
And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who used to be in charge of things; basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become an unstoppable epidemic.
That's probably the most distant star bolano essay part of the first half, to tell you the truth, and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying, schauenfreude kind of way" -- of watching the virus become more and more of a threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinly-veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small distant star bolano essay of backwards, power-hungry religious fundamentalists.
And in this, then, World War Z suddenly shifts from a critique about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations the Middle East and zombies, that is the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companies under the old Cold-War system companies, by the way, where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the people in chargeleading to such ridiculous situations as a full-on tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the "first grand assault.
This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet -- the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and human-on-human deaths of several hundreds of millions of more people.
And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bush-type administration to adequately respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's complete meltdown of Distant star bolano essay Stearns the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United Statesleading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to it?
Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year's Pulitzer-winning The Road ; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyone-for-themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in such times of crisis. Make no mistake, this is a damning and devastating critique of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things; a book that uses the detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society.
It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part of any book that is distant star bolano essay slowest and least interesting; here Brooks uses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies as well as military fetishists.
Because that's the final thing important to understand about World War Zis that it's a novel with a truly global scope; Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, distant star bolano essay, but also how such an epidemic would spread in the village-centric rural areas of distant star bolano essay Asia, the infrastructure-poor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success than others.
For example, distant star bolano essay, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population density is just too high to do much of any good; in his fictional world history, such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, distant star bolano essay, with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over, distant star bolano essay.
Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well; those who are already used to being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in distant star bolano essay usual lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in distant star bolano essay a world. This is opposed to all the clueless middle-class Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into non-action; although that turns out to be true, poor planning unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' mass-murder, distant star bolano essay.
And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one; because as Miranda Reads. New week, New BookTube Video - all about the best and worst literary apocalypses to live through!
The Written Review Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse. Like after any great tragedy, the government wants a record. Max Brooks is their oral historian. Only, when he hands his documents, the bureaucracy whittles it down to the bare facts. Humans, over every nation, dragged their bone weary bodies through this war.
They are now faced with the numbing task of rebuilding society. They deserve to have their stories told. So, he publishes the true account of World War Z. Told in a series of vignettes, we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world. And one thing is certain, life with zombies is a chilling tale. The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts The vignettes are absolutely riveting.
There's a bit of the regular zombie murder mayhem but the story focuses distant star bolano essay the human side of things. How the survivors, survived. There's the blind man who fought off a hoard with no more than a blunt staff. Some people lost their minds - succumbing to tree belief that they have joined the dead. There's the unintentionally cannibalistic family - and so much more. Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has.
Audiobook comments : --Read by Max Brooks, Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese --Highly recommended you listen to this novel - it's a quality production. It feels like I'm next to Max as he interviews the survivors.
I know what you're thinking. I'm usually quite cautious when it comes to handing out that all-important fifth star. I'm distant star bolano essay.
Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
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Star Trek: Discovery - Season Three (Blu-ray) Quick look. price $ $ Game of Thrones: Season 8 (Blu-ray + Digital Copy) 15, Quick look. See product details. Customers also bought Hot new releases See more price $ Dec 23, · It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, its is the last novel by Roberto blogger.com was released in , a year after Bolaño's death. Its themes are manifold, and it revolves around an elusive German author and the unsolved and ongoing murders of women in Santa Teresa, a violent city inspired by Ciudad Juárez and its epidemic of female blogger.com addition to Santa Teresa, settings and themes include the
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