World War Z Max Brooks

Random House published an abridged audiobook (5 hours 59 minutes) in 2007, directed by John McElroy and produced by Dan Zitt, with sound editing by Charles De Montebello. The book is read by Brooks but includes other actors taking on the roles of the many individual characters who are interviewed in the novel. Brooks' previous career in voice acting and voice-over work meant he could recommend a large number of the cast members.[10]

On May 14, 2013, Random House Audio released a lengthier (12 hours 9 minutes) audiobook titled World War Z: The Complete Edition (Movie Tie-in Edition): An Oral History of the Zombie War. It contains the entirety of the original, abridged audiobook, as well as new recordings of each missing segment. Twenty additional actors read the added segments.

A separate, additional audiobook containing only the new recordings not found in the original abridged audiobook was released simultaneously as World War Z: The Lost Files: A Companion to the Abridged Edition.[20] Its length is 6 hours 13 minutes.

Cast

• Max Brooks as the Interviewer, explicitly identified by name as Max Brooks in the audiobook, an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission and implied to be the author of the Civilian Survival Guide.
• Steve Park as Kwang Jingshu, a Chinese physician.
• Frank Kamai as Nury Televadi, a smuggler and human trafficker.
• Nathan Fillion as Stanley MacDonald*, a former soldier in the 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
• Paul Sorvino as Fernando Oliveira*, a Brazilian former surgeon.
• Adetokumboh M'Cormack as Jacob Nyathi*, a South African civilian who survived the first major public outbreak in Cape Town.
• Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warmbrunn, a Mossad agent who helped write the Warmbrunn-Knight Report, the first formal document to recommend countermeasures against the undead.
• Waleed Zuaiter as Saladin Kader, a former Palestinian refugee who moved to Israel just before the start of the Great Panic.
• Jay O. Sanders as Bob Archer, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Dennis Boutsikaris as Travis D'Ambrosia, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and creator of the resource-to-kill ratio.
• Martin Scorsese as Breckinridge "Breck" Scott*, the billionaire creator of Phalanx who fled to Vostok Station at the start of the Great Panic.
• Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson*, the White House Chief of Staff for the unnamed President of the United States during the Great Denial.
• Denise Crosby as Mary Jo Miller*, an American civilian who is the developer, chief architect, and first mayor of Troy, a town in Montana specifically designed to survive an attack by the undead.
• Bruce Boxleitner as Gavin Blaire*, an American blimp pilot.
• Ajay Naidu as Ajay Shah, an Indian former office manager who fled the undead by boarding a ship along the coast of Alang.
• Nicki Clyne as Sharon*, a now-adult feral child.
• Jeri Ryan as Maria Zhuganova*, a former soldier in the Russian army who has become a state broodmare.
• Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins, an American mercenary who was hired to protect a fortified mansion in Long Island full of celebrities during the Great Panic.
• Maz Jobrani as Ahmed Farahnakian, an Iranian former pilot in the Iranian air force who accidentally helped spark the nuclear Iran–Pakistan War.
• Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio, a former soldier in the United States Army.
• Eamonn Walker as Paul Redeker, a controversial former intelligence consultant for the apartheid-era South African government who created the Redeker Plan. In the novel, he is initially referred to as Xolelwa Azania, with it being implied that Redeker suffered some kind of psychotic episode during the war and abandoned his previous identity.
• Eamonn Walker as David Allen Forbes, an English artist who participated in the defense of Windsor Castle.
• Jürgen Prochnow as Philip Adler, a former tank commander in the German Army.
• David Ogden Stiers as Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk*, a former tank commander in the Ukrainian army.
• Michelle Kholos Brooks as Jesika Hendricks, an American-Canadian woman who survived the first winter after the Great Panic when she and her parents fled north.
• Kal Penn as Sardar Khan*, a former member of the Border Roads Organisation.
• Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair Junior, the Chair of the Federal Reserve and former Secretary of Strategic Resources.
• Rob Reiner as "The Whacko", the Vice President of the United States throughout most of the war, heavily implied to be Howard Dean.
• Dean Edwards as Joe Muhammad, a paraplegic former member of a Neighborhood Security team, a volunteer quasi-military outfit intended to protect communities from zombie attacks during the war.
• Frank Darabont as Roy Elliot*, a former Hollywood director who used his talents to direct military propaganda films during the war, inspiring hope to combat Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome.
• Becky Ann Baker as Christina Eliopolis, a pre-war F-22 pilot in the United States Air Force who flew supply runs during the war.
• Parminder Nagra as Barati Palshigar*, an Indian broadcaster for Radio Free Earth who provided information to isolated civilians and fought misinformation during the war.
• Masi Oka as Kondo Tatsumi*, a former otaku who became a member of the Japan Self-Defense Forces Shield Society branch.
• Frank Kamai as Tomonaga Ijiro, a hibakusha who was permanently blinded by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, going on to survive in the wilderness of Hokkaidō during the war and become the founder of the Shield Society.
• John Turturro as Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, a Cuban civilian.
• Ric Young as Xu Zhicai*, a former crewmate of a Type 094 submarine who fought in the Second Chinese Civil War on the side of the victorious rebels.
• Alfred Molina as Terry Knox*, the Australian former commander of the International Space Station throughout the war.
• John McElroy as Ernesto Olguin, a Chilean naval attaché who attended the Honolulu Conference.
• Common as Darnell Hackworth*, a former member of the U.S. Army K-9 Corps.
• F. Murray Abraham as Sergei Ryzhkov*, an Eastern Orthodox priest and former military chaplain who inadvertently sparked the religious revolution that transformed Russia into a theonomy.
• Brian Tee as Hyungchol Choi, the deputy director of the KCIA; and Michael Choi*, a diver in the United States Navy Deep Submergence Combat Corps.
• René Auberjonois as Andre Renard*, a former soldier in the French Army who helped clear the Parisian catacombs of thousands of reanimated refugees.

* The Complete Edition[21]

Reception

In her review of the audiobook for Strange Horizons, Siobhan Carroll called the story "gripping" and found the listening experience evocative of Orson Welles's famous radio narration of The War of the Worlds, broadcast October 30, 1938. Carroll had mixed opinions on the voice acting, commending it as "solid and understated, mercifully free of 'special effects' and 'scenery chewing' overall", but lamenting what she perceived as undue cheeriness on the part of Max Brooks and inauthenticity in Steve Park's Chinese accent.[5]

Publishers Weekly also criticized Brooks' narration, but found that the rest of the "all-star cast deliver their parts with such fervor and intensity that listeners cannot help but empathize with these characters".[22] In an article in Slate concerning the mistakes producers make on publishing audiobooks, Nate DiMeo used World War Z as an example of dramatizations whose full casts contributed to making them "great listens" and described the book as a "smarter-than-it-has-any-right-to-be zombie novel".[23] The World War Z audiobook won the 2007 Audie Award for Multi-Voiced Performance and was nominated for Audiobook of the Year.[24][25]