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World Made by Hand: A Novel, by James Howard Kunstler
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In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever.
- Sales Rank: #159760 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Grove Press
- Published on: 2009-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 5.50" w x 1.00" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 317 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Kunstler's name is mostly associated with nonfiction works like The Long Emergency, a bleak prediction of what will happen when oil production no longer meets demand, and the antisuburbia polemic The Geography of Nowhere. In this novel, his 10th, he visits a future posited on his signature idea: when the oil wells start to run dry, the world economy will collapse and society as we know it will cease. Robert Earle has lost his job (he was a software executive) and family in the chaos following the breakdown. Elected mayor of Union Grove, N.Y., in the wake of a town crisis, Earle must rebuild civil society out of squabbling factions, including a cultish community of newcomers, an established group of Congregationalists and a plantation kept by the wealthy Stephen Bullock. Re-establishing basic infrastructure is a big enough challenge, but major tension comes from a crew of neighboring rednecks led by warlord Wayne Karp. Kunstler is most engaged when discussing the fate of the status quo and in divulging the particulars of daily life. Kunstler's world is convincing if didactic: Union Grove exists solely to illustrate Kunstler's doomsday vision. Readers willing to go for the ride will see a frightening and bleak future. (Mar.)
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Review
"Kunstler's emotional understanding places the book well outside the confines of genre fiction." -- Eve Ottenberg
"Superb ... an extraordinary, suspenseful, deeply affecting yarn that very successfully weaves together elements of science fiction, the Western, and even magical realism.... Read this book." -- Reihan Salam
"Kunstler's storytelling talents are in evidence here.... Kunstler has punctuated the nightmarish scenario of his novel with ... poignant moments where hope and despair vie for dominance of the human spirit." -- Bharti Kirchner
"Within the first few pages of James Howard Kunstler's poignant, provocatively convincing novel set in a future possibly as near as tomorrow, you find yourself musing: could this happen to me? By the end, you're wondering not could, but when?" -- Alan Weisman
"Far from a typical postapocalyptic novel. It caters neither to a pseudo-morbid nor faddishly slick vision of the future. Though grim with portent, it is ultimately, as Camus's novel The Plague, an impassioned and invigorating tale whose ultimate message is one of hope, not despair." -- Michael Leone
"Unlike the bleakness of style and subject in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Kunstler's World Made by Hand Is an end-of-days novel that is more a pleasure than a burden to read; it frightens without becoming ridiculously nightmarish, it cautions without being too judgmental, and it offers glimmers of hope we don't have to read between the lines to comprehend." -- Zak M. Salih
"What's after armageddon? No government, no laws, no infrastructure, no oil, no industry . . . and sometimes a sense of relief. In Kunstler's richly imagined World Made by Hand, the bone-weary denizens of Union Grove (with its echo of Our Town's Grover's Corners) cope with everything from mercenary thugs to religious extremists, yet manage to plant a few seeds of human decency that bear fruit." -- Cathleen Medwick
"Kunstler segues from his analysis of the possible effects of a decline in oil production on modern Industrial society to a full-blown, and artfully carried out, semidystopic dramatization of what small-town American life might be like in the wake of major terrorist bombings and industrial decline on U.S. soil.... But in the end, the beauty of Kunstler's brilliant cautionary fiction, aside from the charming narrative with its many convincing details of life after apocalypse, is that most readers will admit that Earle's world, the world made by hand ... sounds at least as unpredictably pleasing as our own." -- Alan Cheuse
"The verisimilitude of Kunstler's world leads me to think the future is Union Grove. Thirty years from now, it will be interesting to see if that little town seems excessively sad, richly luxurious, or spot on. But for now, I'm hedging my bets. Where I live, one block east of ground zero, I've started keeping a compost bin and am thinking about adding a micro wind generator. [Nearby] the Freedom Tower has just emerged above ground and may one day be full of Investment bankers. Recently, though, I've started looking at that plot through Kunstler's eyes. It gets good sunlight, and it occurs to me it would make a hell of a bean field." -- Paul Greenberg
About the Author
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of nine novels and three nonfiction books, including the bestselling The Long Emergency.
Most helpful customer reviews
420 of 443 people found the following review helpful.
Slipping through our fingers
By Scott Meredith
It's really good. Surprisingly so, given that most attempts at novelisation by people who are basically pundits on an educational/propaganda mission to save the world are dismal artistic failures. But this novel is good, the guy can actually write.
It's a realistic depiction of the post-collapse USA. What collapse, you ask? Not exactly specifically told, but somehow related to Peak Oil, financial ruination, that kind of stuff. He depicts the after-shocks on the ground, rubber-meets-pavement (or I should say, hooves-meet-pavement, I guess).
The world has shrunk into an uneasy Darwinian jostling, local warlordism and gangsterish Machiavellian counterpunching among various ugly power cells, with a bunch of religion leavening the stink, er ... the stew. One civil gentleman tries to hold onto some kind of rational center.
Here's a powerful message from this book (so don't say nobody clued you in time) - Learn a practical trade, something useful, essential to daily life, that requires neither electric power nor high-tech tools or materials. Butcher, baker, candle-stick maker.
Few Interesting Points:
1. Speech style: Everybody's speech pattern has reverted to an oddly folksy kind of 19th century, Mark-Twain-ish patois.
2. Ism's: Not the slightest hint of feminism has survived The Fall. Women are pretty much seen but not heard. And homosexuality seems to perhaps have been swept away by the dreaded plague of "Mexican Flu" maybe? African-American's don't exist in upstate New York, but racial trouble festers elsewhere across the country.
3. Infrastructure: Town in upstate New York benefits very heavily from left-over 19th century infrastructure, most very especially the robustly designed and constructed gravity-fed water ducts. Rest of the country will not have this legacy! *bite nails*
4. Give thanks for (current) hot showers, razors, modern dentistry. No mention is made of the deodorant situation.
Although presented as a disaster scenario, I feel the author secretly has quite a hard-on for the mid 19th century.
Kunstler's depiction of collapsed upper NY state reminds me more than anything of Ishikawa Eisuke's great (Japanese language) novel '2050 Nen ha: Edo Jidai' (Year 2050: Return to the Edo Period), which also gives a local-eye view of a post-collapse, formerly high-tech society. These two novels are very similar, but Kunstler probably didn't model on Ishikawa's earlier work as that is not available in English.
I've read hundreds of apocalypse / post-collapse books, 'The Postman' type of stuff. Some of them, such as Luke Rhinehart's 'Long Voyage Back' or Jean Hegland's 'Into the Forest', are better written, real literature. And some have wilder gripping action, obviously 'Lucifer's Hammer' comes to mind for that. But for poignant realism, to a reader living exactly where and how we are right now, 'World Made By Hand' strikes closest to the heart.
More than anything, this book is sad. It will make you sad. It's a cliche to say that we take everything for granted. We do, but you need that truth rubbed in your face sometimes to revitalize it. This book really does that.
But if you really want to put yourself through an emotional coffee-grinder in the opposite direction, stomp yourself in the gut by reading "The Road" (Cormac McCarthy) immediately prior to "World by Hand". Then you'll feel that Kuntstler's "World", where at least the grass still grows and the rivers still flow, is for all its horrors, a beautiful Elysian Field, direct from the hand of whatever Lord you care to name.
165 of 174 people found the following review helpful.
The apocalypse as bittersweet
By Kerry Walters
There are significant flaws in Kunstler's World Made By Hand. That's the bad news. The good news, though, is that it's an incredibly seductive vision of the world after things have fallen apart. It takes an artist of great skill to make the apocalypse look attractive.
First, the bad news. Except for the protagonist Robert Earle and his buddy Loren Holder, none of the characters are really developed. This is especially true of poor Jane Ann, Loren's wife and Robert's mistress, and Britney, the young widow who eventually becomes Robert's live-in lover. But curiously, it's also true of Brother Jobe, the leader of the New Faith cult that comes into town. For that matter, the New Faithers as a whole are underdeveloped. Sometimes they seem ominous, sometimes innocent. What's the reader supposed to make of them?
Moreover, the novel begins to unravel toward the end, as if Kunstler had planned a book twice its size but halfway through ran out of steam and abruptly pulled the plug. The Queen Bee and identical deaths chapters are bizarrely out of place, without absolutely no textual anticipation or follow-up. (Likewise with the curiously irrelevant--yet its portency is clearly suggested--revelation that Robert is actually a Jew who has changed his name: what's that all about!?) An earlier reviewer insightfully remarked that the book's chapters could almost be read as individual vignettes.
So why read the book? Ah, that's where the good news comes in. Kunstler's world made by hand is one that is emerging after the world we now dwell in has collapsed. Terrorist attacks on both coasts, the end of fossil fuels and the lifestyle that went with them, devastating diseases spread in part by the warming of the planet, and a total breakdown of centralized government and communications, have all contributed to a new way of life that returns survivors to an earlier way of life. Communities are relatively self-supporting, isolated, and mechanical (made by hand). Folks learn genuine skills--carpentry, bee-keeping, sewing, music-making--instead of the bizarrely artificial ones we now think are indispensible--banking, accounting, travel agenting, real estating. Since there's no fuel, people walk or ride horses. Their slower pace of life reawakens them to the beauty of nature, the solace of silence, the rejuvenating effects of simplicity. Life in Kunstler's new world isn't easy, and the crash that took everything down was obviously pretty bad. But in the midst of the ruins, something important is being rediscovered.
How ironic, that the collapse of a society that wantonly glutted itself on nonrenewable resources might reveal a perennially renewable resource: human spirit, cooperation, compassion, and hope. But the bittersweetness of this realization is permanent, because the renewability of humanity, at least in Kunstler's novel, carries an enormous pricetag.
84 of 92 people found the following review helpful.
well-done apocalyptic contrast to mccarthy's road
By David W. Straight
This is a finely-written view of a post-collapse America. Cormac Mccarthy's novel Road was an altogether darker vision: Kunstler's book is neither as dark or foreboding. Society functions, but only locally--there are no national or even regional governments, as far as is known. We've gone from Friedman's The World is Flat to a world where communication and trade resembles that of, say, 800AD. "Here be Dragons" might as well appear on maps. The number of people in Union Grove in upstate New York who have travelled more than 50 miles from home is small, at least until a flock of The New Faith arrive from Virginia.
The amenities are gone: no gasoline, no bicycles (for want of rubber tires), no antibiotics, no anaesthesia, roads and bridges crumbling into complete disrepair. Yet life goes on, as America in 1700 got by without bicycles and antibiotics. Robert Earle, the central fugure in the novel, works as a carpenter--his former life in computing is gone forever. Lack of oil, nuclear explosions, and the Mexican Flu all contributed to the collapse. The Flu took most of Earle's family except for his son, who left on his own many years before and never heard from again. Earle takes things philosophically and with grace, and is more at ease with his world than most of us could be. In Earle, Kunstler has provided a rock about which life swirls: he provides a foundation of normality, insofar as normality can exist, and his character prevents a doom-and-gloom view type book from prevailing.
Kunstler presents a well-drawn picture of a world where there are no chain saws and power tools, no refrigeration, very little electric power anywhere. Paper money is disappearing, bartering is returning, work is done by hand. Horses are great assets. You will probably find yourself asking some questions: some of these are answered, some are not. After 20 or 30 years of life in places such as Union Grove, where are the clothes coming from? How many people could weave a shirt? There do not seem to be many sheep around for wool, and you get the impression from the book that everything isn't animal skins. What about glassmaking for storage jars and windows? There should perhaps be a cottage industry for saltpeter to make gunpowder. But these are relatively minor. The primary thing is the wonderfully detailed, finely crafted view of a world where people have had to return to the amenities of colonial times, or even long before that. This is a novel that's creative and well thought out: very worth reading.
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