The View from 58-inches High

This book was chosen by our book club. I was excited because I was expecting something very light and easy to read. This book disappointed in a good way. While the book does center on a zombie plague, the real story is the reaction to the plague. The “crisis” could have been anything and 90% of the book would have held true. The book was smart, thought-provoking, and emotional. It was not at all what I expected.

The first thing that caught my attention is that the whole book is written like a post-apocalyptic documentary. Every chapter is an interview with a short introduction of the interviewee; just like you would read in a magazine. Normally this would be distracting as the reader is not able to connect with any one character. Instead, it adds world-wide prospective and the short nature of the narratives emphasizes the scale and speed of the epidemic. The narratives flow chronologically and often reference people from other interviews.

The book makes you question how a crisis like this would be handled by the world. The use of zombies is actually genius in this way.  There is hardly a crisis out there that doesn’t have some political slant to it. The use of zombies as opens the reader to consider the questions, posed so subtly, without bias.

I’m not sure how Max Brooks managed to cram so many social issues into one book without it feeling overwhelming in the slightest. Through the interviews, he is able to expose the events and the choices that led up to those events. Often, he offers multiple view points on the same issue. Many of the stories are from within the organization which made the decision then from the outside observer. These are not always successive, which further adds to the depth of the overall story.  There are the large-scale themes of freedom of information, human selection, and rebuilding civilizations. Woven within these larger issues are painful stories of survival and loss. These were the most gripping.

“I looked behind us and thought I could just make her out, this little spec getting smaller each second. I thought she looked like she was running after us, but I was so tired and confused I couldn’t be sure. I probably just didn’t want to know.”

“We should have known way before he dropped out of formation, before we heard the shot. He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR between his knees, that smile still on this face. I looked up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was his home.”

I spent many nights questioning what choices I would make if the time came. This is not an easy read in that it will stay with you well after you are done reading it. Even the end of the book is very open ended. I will read this book again.