DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Anne-Marie Gaillard, Duration: 5 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Set in a dystopian future in Ireland, Last Ones Left Alive is the story of Orpen, a teenage girl. The world is overrun by "skrakes". The reader is never exactly told what skrakes are, but it is useful to just think of them as a sort of zombie. Skrakes hunt humans and when a human is bitten by a skrake, the human gets an infection and becomes a skrake.  Orpen grew up on an island off of the coast of Ireland. There are three of them - Orpen, her mother and another woman named Maeve, The skrakes never come to the island, but from time to time her mother and Maeve must leave the island to scrounge for supplies and hunt. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present and flashbacks to Orpen's childhood. There  are hints as to what Maeve and her mother did before they came to the island. It is clear is that they have extraordinary hand-to-hand comba...

Originally published in 2011 by Doubleday. I don't often read zombie novels. I have reviewed 1600+ books and this is only my second one featuring zombies. They're not really my thing, but I figured that if an author who won two Pulitzer Prizes wrote a zombie book, it must be worth reading. I was wrong. The premise behind ZONE ONE is quite good, but it is an over-written mess. Mark Spitz (a nickname) is a man who has gone through his life as a B/B+ type of guy. Never the smartest guy in class, never the first guy picked to play for the schoolyard games, but certainly not close to the last. He kind of floats through life being "good enough." The reader meets Mark Spitz well into the Zombie Apocalypse. He is working as part of a mopping up crew in New York City. He and his crew are seeking out Zombies that the military may have missed in their sweep through the city. The worst of the Zombie attacks has passed and a provisional government is working out of Buffalo, New Y...

I reluctantly started this one and finished it enthusiastically Originally published in 2006 by Crown. A friend from work had World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War on his desk and said I should read it. Zombies!? No thanks! I've avoided all of the Twilight books and the other undead/monster books. He pitched it by saying it was fictional (of course!) but modeled after the very real work of Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II . For those that don't know, Terkel interviewed hundreds of people about World War II and arranged their interviews into a narrative of sorts that told the history of the war. Well, that wasn't much of a selling point either because I never really got into Studs Terkel very much, so this was strike two. But, I took it home and started reading. Max Brooks The first 20-30 pages are boring but they do set up the rest of the book by introducing the concept of zombies, how they came to be, what they are capabl...