Attractive, well-dressed writing and some buxom, sexy phrase-turning make this novel’s surface shiny and pretty. However, its hollowness, lack of depth and monotone emotionlessness make the interior a soulless, vacuous fail. It’s prose porn with no emotional money shot, and like traditional porn Zone One dispenses with plot, character and any hint of deeper meaning in favor of excessive, gratuitous word humping. The language is technically proficient and has an appealing shape, but inside is sha...

Oh dear. Is it possible to make flesh-hungering zombies seem dull? While I never thought so, AMC and Whitehead have both been giving it their all by enveloping them in navel-gazing Philosophy 101 monologues and odd series of pastoral flashbacks in the midst of life-or-death situations. Whitehead, at least, delivers his philosophy with amazing prose, while the writers at The Walking Dead (season two) rely on repetition of words like 'humanity' more times than Hobbes could shake a stick at. We get...

looking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the month, and i hope they will find new readers!AHHHHHHHH!!! jesus christ, but colson whitehead can write. i read the intuitionist way back when everyone was praising it to the moon as the masterpiece of the next great american writer, but that book didn't really do a lot for me, while this one keel-hauled me. it was strolling along at a solid four stars u...

Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today There is a lot to sink your teeth into in the latest book from MacArthur Genius grantee Colson Whitehead. The nation has pretty much collapsed, with the implication that things are no better elsewhere in the world. But there is still some hope. A provisional government has been set up in Buffalo, and some organization is returning. The government wants to clear Manhattan of undesirables, (real estate developers?) in order to repopulate, in order to sh

Damn, this book is cold. Like, really, really, C-O-L-D. The language is magnificent; there is no doubt Whitehead can write, but he writes with no heat. His writing here is like a perfect, shiny new Cadillac (but with no engine). Without the engine, what’s the point? You can sit and look pretty all the live long day, but you’re not gonna get anywhere worth talking about (or remembering). Whitehead’s problem here seems to be that he gets so caught up in delivering the goods on literary stylistics

FRIDAYmark monday got up at his usual hour, in his usual bed, and after leisurely winding his way through his various morning routines, made his way to work, to perform his usual functions. it was a friday, a day where most of his colleagues found reasons to be elsewhere - appointments and such - and so this was mark's favorite work day to be in the office. the lack of potential irritation meant more work could be accomplished. on some level, he realized that this was perhaps a rather uncharitab...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/After having my morbidly obese patootey pretty much blown away by The Underground Railroad, I knew Colson Whitehead was an author I wanted to read more of. When attempting (unsuccessfully, natch) to get a library copy of Isaac Marion’s latest, this one popped up on the “sorry we didn’t have the fluffy zombie romance you were hoping for, maybe you would like to read a super smart zombie book instead?????” window. Zone One is a story man...

I've got to respect a Harvard-educated literary novelist who decides to defy expectations and write a zombie novel. I think that takes a lot of guts (bad pun, sorry) as well as brains (okay, I'll stop now.) Colson Whitehead's Zone One follows the exploits of a protagonist known only by his nickname, Mark Spitz. To explain why he's called that would be to spoil some of the fun. In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, the human survivors are attempting to reclaim the island of Manhattan. Marines

Does it ever seem to you like everything sucks? Not just your own life -- with its minor setbacks and Pyrrhic victories -- but the entire existence of mankind. You know, all of humanity? I think that sometimes. When I'm filling up my car with gas, for instance, and I see a guy wearing scarves as shoes. And then later that day, the person in front of me orders a coffee drink with more than two modifiers (half-caff and no foam and part-skim). Or whenever I accidentally listen to sports talk radio

In an addendum to my original review, I initially gave this book three stars. Then I watched the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, and it struck me that if a television show can display complex human emotion and interaction while simultaneously incorporating what is expected of the genre, this book should have been able to do the same thing. If you think that is ridiculous, so be it. In the interest of full disclosure, Zone One is one of the books that beat out my novel, That Which Should N...

The banality of zombie apocalypse, beautifully rendered. Reading this book was something like reading a book about housecleaning, if housecleaning were to have life-and-death consequences.

”He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent destinati...

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.Reading other reviews for Zone One, it seems that the union is pretty small in the Venn diagram of “people who like zombie stories” and “people who like literary fiction.” But this novel worked for me. I had no issue with the story’s structure: a three-day stretch in which a team of sweepers works to continue clearing zombie “stragglers” o...

“The dead had paid their mortgages on time…graduated with admirable GPAs, configured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401(k)s…and superimposed the borders of the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhood, which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life. In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one.”Zone One is full...

There is a reason I hate stream-of-consciousness novels. I can't follow it. I like my novels to travel down a path - it may veer off every now and then, and that's okay because those little detours may prove to be wonderful, terrifying, heart-stopping, mysterious or whatnot, but they are almost always revelatory. Sometimes immediately, sometimes long after the fact that you need to really remember and say "Oh yeah, I remember when that happened! Huh! That's what that meant." Either way, it doesn...

A powerful, thought provoking oddball of a book. How to even categorize it? I suppose it is a thinking man's zombie novel, though it is lacking in the required skin-ripping, intestine-chomping, walking dead action that would hold most zombie aficionados' interest. The living ARE hunted by the dead, but Whitehead does not linger on the messy details.A team arrives in New York City to clear out areas for possible reclaimation when the crisis has ended. The city looms large in this book, pulsating...

Don't believe the nags who say Whitehead over-writes or that Zone One is plotless: this is a rip-roaring, blood-curdling horror novel that will make you ache with laughter the one second and your toes curl the next.Besides, one of the greatest features of the Kindle is the built-in dictionary, which means you don't you have to leave Post-it reminders all over pages to check out word meanings.Zone One is also written in crystalline, incantatory prose so beautiful you will find yourself reading ch...

When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans. But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a...

Unbearable. That's all I can say. I bailed about one-quarter of the way in. I am so done, I don't want to bother reviewing, but I need to dig my head out of the word salad that was this book and warn fellow readers.Are there commandments for novel writing? If there are, I want to submit these for consideration: - Lists do not constitute atmosphere. - Noting a man's actions does not constitute character development. - Words need to have purpose, not just look fancy on paper.We all have access to...

Second Reading: June 30 - July 4, 2013We are studied in the old ways, and acolytes of what's to come.I was a young teen when I first watched Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. Watching with my two friends, we vocalized our response to the undead onslaught: advice on which windows needed better fortification, admonitions on how to deal best with the character that's losing his/her shit, and the most expedient way of dispatching a ghoul - all of the responses in no way unique to a typi