Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks

Source: Amazon.com

From the book’s cover:

The Zombie Survival Guide is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now. Fully illustrated and exhaustively comprehensive, this book covers everything you need to know, including how to understand zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective defense tactics and weaponry, ways to outfit your home for a long siege, and how to survive and adapt in any territory or terrain.

Top 10 Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

Don’t be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset—life. This book is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now without your even knowing it. The Zombie Survival Guide offers complete protection through trusted, proven tips for safeguarding yourself and your loved ones against the living dead. It is a book that can save your life.

The review:

Please Note: this review was done before I saw the film/read the novel World War Z.  Take that into consideration as you proceed.

The author, Max Brooks. / Source: bleedingcool.net

It's amazing how serious some people take this zombie thing.  I found the way that the author of The Zombie Survival Guide tied in all sorts of historical events into a supposed zombie epidemic to be sort of funny, to be honest.  And then how each incident was made so synchronous so as to keep commonality between the author's argument.  Not much attempt to let things be weird or unexplained; the book tries to make everything explainable from the supposition that a zombie-causing virus has been on the Earth pretty much forever.

I thought the inventiveness of the past events depicted was good, and the "survival guide" part was adequate for most serious situations.  The parts about zombies could just as easily be exorcised in favor of pandemics or non-world-wiping-out-type nuclear war or what-have-you.

In my review I state that it is disconcerting when you discover how many "zombie aapocalypse"people there are out there.  I didn't know the half of it.  Google images of "zombie survival guide."  I dare you.  Of course, this one is a clever advertisement from ACE Hardware.  I really hope it's not just a make-up thing.  I hope some ingenious hardware sales team came up with this.  / Source: gopixpic.co

There were some errors, one of which I picked up on pretty quick.  The section on underwater combat of the undead was... well the author really tried hard, but the idea of hunting zombies underwater is laughable to this reader.  For one thing, Brooks asserts that zombies could wander into the water, be it river lake or the ocean, and shamble about until they either emerged somewhere onto land, caught hold of hapless humans who swam or waded too close, or decay and fall to pieces.  And yes, this seems reasonable, based on Brooks' assertions that this is a virus and it has been around forever.  

But he fails to take into account the levels of silt underwater, and that people - if they didn't need oxygen to breathe - would still be unable to navigate the ocean floor (even the parts not so deep that the pressure levels would crush us like overripe melons) because there aren't nice hard surfaces and no serious variation in terrain.  Maybe zombies could wander around in a fairly level-bottomed lake (and those are not guaranteed either, by the way), but the ocean?  The chances of even one zombie going in and then coming out again - ever - are really bad.  Yes, the author tries to smooth this out, but I don't think he really considers the sea adequately.

And in case you needed to assess your threat level, based on the type of zombie you're facing, here is another handy chart.  Looks like the folks in Return of the Living Dead were... well, screwed. / Source: paperspencils.com

For myself, I think Brooks would have done better by considering more possibilities of the origins of zombies, other than stating categorically that it is a virus, that it has a name, that it has been tracked and reported throughout history, and so-forth.  It is a pet peeve of mine when somebody takes an idea that is both cross-cultural and doesn't need a solid "zero" hour to base from, and then tries to make everything into their own personal theory on it.  "Zombies" are a fun, if macabre, subject.  Why tie it up into a neat little package?  I can only guess this was done because Brooks was writing/had wrote World War Z, and wanted to either prep the way or further capitalize on that work.  I'll let you know, when I read it.

The guide is informative, and if taken seriously, it could make a good guide to a potential zombie apocalypse.  If things happened as Brooks states they have/will.  But if the zombie apocalypse  - supposing such a thing could happen, which is possible but not nearly as likely as Brooks makes the reader believe, and again, this is my opinion, based on my own life experience and research as a historian - does occur, and it isn't a virus, or it doesn't kill people, or it doesn't require head-shots to kill the undead, or a thousand other variables are wrong, Zombie Survival Guide then isn't much good as the definitive survival guide, now is it?  It could be used in most cases, as Brooks' work is pretty drastic and could still work in many potential scenarios, but it is not the end-all/ be-all guide to this subject.  I'd say to keep that firmly in mind.

Apparently I'm not the only one who sees the correlation. / Source: thewellnet.blogspot.com

Other gripes I had about this book tie back to that survival book I read about a few years ago (see the review for that here), and the suggestions it made about getting a secure place and preparing every needful thing and living apart from the doomed society that just hasn't fallen yet (but will - oh yes; can I get an amen?) and like that.  Zombie Survival Guide and that text differ widely.  So I suppose you just have to read the news and pay attention and then do your best, when something BAD happens.  Gee, that's what experts have been saying all along, right?

In conclusion, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead is a fun book, and makes plenty of rational arguments for surviving an uprising of the living dead, should such an event occur.  Will it keep you safe if something like that happens, though?  I hope I never have to find out.  But if I do, I'll be glad I read it.  Unless something in its pages turns out to be patently false, that is. Then I'm screwed, and so is anyone else who relies on this guide above common sense and human survival instinct.  Then again, we all gotta die sometime, right?

Learn more about The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks, on Amazon.com

The parting comment:

Source: LOLSnaps.com

Because after all, you're gonna have some unused brains laying around after a zombie apocalypse.  This fixes Brooks' entire book.  We don't need no stinkin' survival plan.  All we need is some lengths of poles and some good fishing line and some surplus brains.  Problem solved.