World Made by Hand: A Novel Reviews

• Slipping through our fingers

  
  By AJTYZCWKUL97Z on 2008-02-20
  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.
  
  
  

• The apocalypse as bittersweet

  
  By AYCJSA9HR7TKO on 2008-04-07
  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.
  
  

• Vivid Depiction of Life in the Long Emergency

  
  By A1YADUSGZMD6C2 on 2008-02-09
  James Howard Kunstler is as important a public intellectual as we have today. This work gives him an opportunity to imagine in fictional terms what life may be like during the permanent crisis he believes inevitable. It is every bit as gripping as the "Living in the Long Emergency" chapter from his previous book, but as a story the novel embodies a genuine narrative momentum unavailable to the essayist. Mr. Kunstler portrays skillfully the community of Union Grove, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of Washington County, New York. He introduces very early in the text a conflict between town citizens and Wayne Karp, a former trucker who runs the disreputable salvaging operation from the dump beyond the edge of Union Grove. This is amongst the narrative's widest arcs, resolved only at the novel's end. The secondary conflict is between wealthy landowner Stephen Bullock and Dan Curry, the corrupt merchant who controls business in Albany, and it broadens effectively the range of Mr. Kunstler's social criticism.
  
  But the story, itself, really belongs to the first-person narrator, Robert Earle, a former software executive who moved from suburban Boston to Union Grove after a West Coast terrorist attack closed all ports and thus choked the American economy. His family is splintered by the long emergency: wife Sandy and daughter Genna have died without antibiotics and state-of-the-art medical care; son Daniel has left home to see what is left of America beyond upstate New York. Fortunately, Robert has carpentry skills and more than a little residual ambition, awakened by the arrival of the "New Faith" religious sect that uses the abandoned high school in town as its new headquarters. There is delicious tension between these strident evangelicals and the passive congregationalists that make up the faithful in Union Grove. Until the arrival of Brother Jobe and his crew from the South, religion seems little more than a surrogate for collapsed state and city governments. But even the fire-and-brimstone of the New Faith is tempered with civic practicality and the no-nonsense might of former soldiers who assert themselves in their new surroundings. As if to balance the ambitions of the newcomers, the livyers of Union Grove shake off the lethargy that befell them after their initial accommodation to crisis. Mr. Kunstler here recognizes that ideological conflict should give rise to compromise and innovation in healthy societies, in contrast to the political schisms that have arrested our progress today. In a world made by hand, community is more important than anything else, and it is true that individuals thrive in Union Grove based on their ability and willingness to collaborate with their neighbors. There are long passages describing the bounties of an earth relieved of much of its industrial burden. Mr. Kunstler takes great pleasure in describing food and drink, the acoustic music that defines what little leisure time is available to a people drawn back into agrarian living.
  
  There are many clever touches throughout. Intermittent flashes of electricity animate old radios long enough to broadcast exhortations from hysterical preachers. There is no press, though references to broadsheets brought by traders suggest the American federal government, having fallen apart after various attempts at martial law, has been unable to reassert itself. The two-day odyssey to Albany, accomplished in less than an hour today by car, employs the "road trip" to show the suffering of outliers and the dishonesty of commerce that tries to proceed as if globalization is soon coming back. There is no rubber for tires or footwear, no refrigeration, no proper anesthetic. One cannot read this novel without appreciating how fragile life will be without the essentials whose existence we have smothered underneath our luxuries, and, yet, this remains a remarkably optimistic book. Mr. Kunstler is criticized always for his gloomy writings, as he imagines for example the class riots we will suffer once the lumpen realize, once and for all, the American Dream will not be theirs. But Union Grove will not here tolerate delinquency, and in a population already thinned by the Mexican Flu epidemic, citizens who are careless about themselves and others simply do not survive.
  
  I appreciate the thought that has gone into reconsidering new challenges to the family. How will gender relations change when women who may have children are no longer valued for the diversity of views they bring to the corporate world? What role is there for children in an agrarian society that offers only rudimentary schooling? What complicated living arrangements may emerge when many husbands and wives are taken, prematurely, from partners who expected the ease of divorce, and not the onset of epidemic, to be the biggest challenge to their marriages? Similarly, the plantation run by Stephen Bullock and the compound constructed by the New Faith sect suggest old ways of organizing ourselves that may be reasserted. The former offers limited hydroelectricity if one only embraces a feudal model; the latter is built around a mystical seer who suggests that unexplained wonders still pulse beneath the din of our iPods.
  
  I think I expected to read how our world fell apart when I picked up this novel. Mr. Kunstler must provide some explanations, of course, and so his characters are permitted a limited amount of reminiscing, though readers are reminded constantly that nostalgia is deadly in a world made by hand. Similarly, young Sarah Watling is introduced as a character to whom Robert is obliged to explain something of how they got where they presently find themselves. But if you want to know what Union Grove had to survive, you can always read Mr. Kunstler's non-fiction. You are not very far into this book before you start wondering what happens when winter comes, and the problem is no longer the humidity but the cold, itself. A gravity-based water system allows something like modern plumbing: what happens when it freezes? I am not puzzled by what happened as much as I am eager to imagine what happens next. If this is truly a world made by hand, it is one made most vividly by the labors of an accomplished and confident author.
  
  

• well-done apocalyptic contrast to mccarthy's road

  
  By A34ZMJ0W0206GQ on 2008-02-26
  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.
  
  

• Rave Review of Fascinating and Important Novel

  
  By A1YUL9PCJR3JTY on 2008-02-14
  Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3IYIM724UYOZQ This book is a great read, an unusual type of science fiction, or better called "speculative fiction" about what our future might hold for us here in the United States. Even though it takes place in a particular small town in New York, you can imagine vividly what would happen in your town as you read it. I made this video immediately after finishing this novel. I started it last night and finished it this morning, unable to put it down. My video is a rave about the book, which everyone certainly will like, even if you are unaware of or uninterested in the important questions it raises. By the end of the book you will have a different perspective, I promise.
  
  
• Stick to Kunstler's nonfiction!
  By A24JYN0W30N8WF on 2008-03-03
  The plot is slow, the characters are hollow, the dialogue is sophmoric and the writing is poor. The physical and psychological description of the post oil world is where Kunstler excels and this makes the book worth looking through. Kunstler's Suburbia works and The Long Emergency are important books. World Made by Hand is not. I've learned a lot from his speeches, essays and blog and encourage anyone interested in the future to check them out. I'm not planning on reading his other nonfiction works though
  
  
• in this case, it's ok to shoot the messenger
  By A344XBDCYRIQUY on 2008-05-26
  It is not the 'supposed' main message of this book that is the problem. Peak oil is for real. But this novelist has shown his hand, so to speak, in a very disturbing way. The author appears to be a raving misogynist. Half my law school class, more than half of veterinians, and M.D.'s, and many engineers now are women, yet in Kunstler's future world, educated women do not exist, while there are still plenty of educated men left from before the crash. Did all these educated women conveniently die of the flu? And a men-only city council meeting, without protest from women, come on! And how about all the women who will be coming back from the "oil" wars, as they are now? Where were they? He has men only coming back.
  The protagonist ends up with this young little woman who is a good cook and cleans his house and squeaks plaintively about being fearful of having done something wrong at a moment when that would be the last thing on anyone's mind.
  Yet, before I read the book, all the reviews talked about how "real" the book felt. Real enough, if you don't mind that half the people are stuffed into unlikely little niches. Apparently, this suits most men, because the reviewers do not seem to have noticed. Women, beware!
  
  
  
• Fails as fiction and non-fiction
  By A3HQ934TX70WFB on 2008-03-31
  While "World Made By Hand" is a provocative attempt to fictionalize the future Kunstler laid out in "The Long Emergency", ultimately the story falls flat, hobbled with a poorly drawn plot and one-dimensional characters. The book's ending is rushed and leaves the reader hanging (it feels as though the novel was quite literally chopped in half) and I got the sense that Kunstler was more interested in coming up with vignettes illustrating "Long Emergency" factoids than with formulating a convincing narrative.
  
  One could ignore WMBH's failings as fiction, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, and just read it as a series of short stories illustrating challenges facing a post-Peak Oil U.S., but the book can't even be enjoyed in this non-fictional sense, due to Kunstler's puzzling decision to include fantastical elements in the book (e.g., the bizarre Queen Bee character and the explicitly identical deaths). Neither of these is ever explained and the protagonist (as well as Kunstler himself) seems content to just shrug his shoulders and ask the reader to do the same.
  
  It's a bit much to complain, as Kunstler does in "The Long Emergency" that Americans are living lives pervaded with fantasy and then turn around and write a novel of a Long Emergency future that is...pervaded with fantasy.
  
  If you want a rational description of the challenges facing a post-Peak Oil America, don't waste your time with "World Made By Hand" - pick up "The Long Emergency" instead. If you want a well written (yet plausible) apocalyptic novel, look at "Oryx and Crake" or "The Road".
  
  
• An Exciting, Intelligent Read
  By A35RP14Y0QRY1Q on 2008-02-13
  A compelling and intelligent novel that is made all the more enjoyable by a pacing that carries the reader from a gently enthralling/hard-to-put-down start into a pulse-raising/can't-put-down adventure.
  
  The book is full of the details of a life "lived by hand." Rather than weigh the action down, these details are folded seamlessly and meaningfully into the story and are quite riveting (and edifying). I believe they speak to something that is deeply human: a need so fundamental that it is perhaps synonymous with love to know how to make do with our hands, our wits and our immediate social community and physical environment. After all, we came into being and spent all of our existence as humans, but for a relatively meaningless blip of time, in such a state. It is who we are. Perhaps this is why I found the book, despite some daunting and frightening moments for the early 21st century reader to contemplate, ultimately uplifting. We are not, in fact, lost without our 20th-21st century gadgets, toys and luxuries. We are both much simpler and yet much more than our recent history would have us believe and this is still very much within us. A ninety-seven year old character in the book who lived through the 20th century into the world made by hand reports that for all the grief, hardships and shock of the transition, "on balance she preferred the way things are now." The reader may be inclined to agree.
  
  There are two twists to the plot worthy of the great masters of another genre that are surprising both in their nature and in how well they work with the novel as a whole. They demonstrate an unusual and intriguing deftness on the author's part.
  
  World Made By Hand left me eager for more.
  
  
• shoddy effort
  By A3RGKOMMU8Z7PD on 2008-03-20
  Kunstler's writing style has been described as ¨brutally eloquent¨ and ¨semi-gonzo¨ and that is what I look for. There is no evidence of it in this book. It seems like a job done too fast, too shallowly. Some of the ideas are half-baked: this town has a gravity water system which becomes part of the plot; what comes in must go out, what happens to the sewage? They have no chemicals for the inflow, so they hardly have any for the outflow. Do they just dump it all downriver? Another oddity: they have zero news. Where are the traveling tradespeople simple America used to be so full of, bringing salt from the coast, and regional news? None of these forlorn smalltown folks had the wit to put in a few solar pannels or a crank radio? What happened to all the ham radio or community radio or pirate radio people so active in our own world, forgot to get microhydro?
  
  There is tremendous sadness permeating the book, understandably, as people count their losses over and over. But where is the fury? These people inhabit the scrabbling world of Homo scavenger, as far into the future as they can see. Don't they ever rave at those culprits who plundered the previous world and brought on the collapse? The only person who does a minor angry riff gets murdered right after.
  
  The book carefully avoids any deeper musings. We are told that farmer Bullock has ¨a comprehensive vision of what was going on in our society¨ but we are never told what it is, nor why people call him a ¨dangerous man.¨ And is ¨surviving in comfort¨ the only vision in this world? How is that different from today?
  
  The women are all either wives or helpmeets (except for a disgusting prophetess), and we are told that ¨egalitarian pretenses¨ have dissolved. Nothing else. Ha! The men have abdicated any efforts on behalf of the town's management, but the womenfolk just think about sex and homemade wine. Dream on, Mr Kunstler!
  
  And not one of these people has any reflection to offer regarding why their world unraveled, nor any ideas how to prevent similar mistakes in the future. They are longing for the amenities of yesteryear, and the sense I have at the end of the book is that they will spend their future trying to recreate them as much as they can. Sad, really, and a waste of an interesting imagined world.
  
  Then, towards the end, the two intelligent protagonists do something really stupid, just to further the plot. I hate that. The best part of the book is about the food: it is so squeaky fresh it made my mouth water.
  
  
  
• Don't read it!
  By A36Z409PGF6ZU1 on 2008-05-30
  How I wish I had read the 1-2 star reviews of this book before purchasing. I'm not even done with it and am already planning my trip to Half-Price Books to dump it. I was a big fan of "The Long Emergency," but this fiction effort falls WAY short of the potential to describe the post-peak-oil world.
  
  The author is completely focused on himself... let's see, he (the protagonist) gets to f*** the beautiful minister's wife once a week (plus she's falling in love with him), gets a couple more young women to salivate over him (clean his house and possibly f*** and fall in love with him), gets to be the Hero rescuing a woman and her child from a house fire, is elected mayor (or something) against his will, goes on a posse/rescue mission with a bunch of men... the macho/fantasy/ego trips go on and on.
  
  And, he apparently HATES women, since there are no equals to the men in this book. All the women are projections of the author's narcissistic fantasies.
  
  Worst of all, the writing STINKS! There's nothing descriptive, nothing insightful, nothing even remotely helpful (in case you were planning to prepare for a long emergency). His attempts to tie in some points from "Emergency" are pathetic afterthoughts.
  
  My takeaways? Invest in a power source and stock up on coffee and chocolate. Mmmmm... would have done that anyway without wasting time on this book. Don't buy it. Don't borrow it. This book is a loser.
  
  
• Jim, what were you thinking?
  By A1KSZ578VIWB0T on 2008-03-04
  I am a devoted JHK fan - a Monday morning never goes by without a visit to his website. This attempt to fictionalize his wonderful non-fiction is an absurd muddle that I could not wait to get done with (out of obligation I suppose). It has a few Long Emergency commercials but is mostly a poorly written mess.
  
  
• Major disappointment.
  By AWZ9QXERDZFGO on 2008-04-19
  Wow, what a letdown. I have been a fan of JHK's writing and observations for years, and he is normally brilliant. This novel, however, was a complete waste of time. It was as if this story was nothing more than a vehicle for Kunstler to inject his fantasies about what life would be like without electricity and oil. In this future world of his, he has a lot of hair, is a virtuoso fiddle player, and the whole town loves and adores him, including every woman he comes in contact with, regardless of their age or marital status. And even though the "end" occurs in what seems to be about 2025, he and his "band" plays music that was popular 100 years earlier? Really? He should take a lesson from business: stick to your core competencies, and lay off the fiction.
  
  
• A revenge fantasy for old hippies
  By A2Y9U0BLP7Q9UM on 2008-05-10
  Few books have scared the bejesus out of me more than Kunstler's The Long Emergency,so I was eager to read his fictional depiction of life after our cheap-oil based economy collapses. Survivors face a grim fate indeed: having to live in a small town with former marketing executives and claims adjusters who somehow now smoke weed in corn cob pipes, play "old time" string music, and use words like "yonder" and "reckon" without irony. A third of the way into the book it struck me that, rather than a dystopia, A World Made By Hand is a utopia for the white male upper middle class aging hippie demographic that shares Kunstler's cultural biases. Union Grove, New York, is a quasi-Amish paradise devoid of African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and teenagers with their loud hip hop music, all of whom seem to have been conveniently eliminated by terrorist nuclear attacks on two US cities and a pandemic. The villain is a NASCAR fan in a camouflage t-shirt who misses listening to Charlie Daniels (how gauche!). The women characters don't seem to mind performing chores all day that were done via machine in the twentieth century. I would have preferred a fictional depiction of the slow collapse of civilization when the oil dries up instead but, if Kunstler and other peak-oil doom sayers are correct, we'll soon be living it rather than reading about it.
  
  
  
  
• Wish I'd never read it
  By A2HZTZP1FOWXXR on 2008-06-09
  After reading The Long Emergency, I expected something of substance by this author. Uncomfortably, I felt I knew something about Kunstler by the way the women interacted with the main character, and I was embarrassed for him. Then bringing in a sci-fi twist towards the end of the book, only to abandon it almost completely (except for a quick reference to Brother Jobe looking like an insect)? There was nothing intriguing in that and seemed only that the writer became distracted or bored. Awful novel by a non-fiction author I admire.
  
  
• Interesting for showing the author's own idiosyncracies, but not credible.
  By A2P00GHIZ9W0IJ on 2008-08-23
  Paul Krugman had a column the other day at the New York Times. It's about the fragile nature of world trade, and how nationalism and protectionism could cause it to unravel more easily than one might think.
  
  The eye-opener, though, is how he uses the pre-WWI economy as an example of a global one not unlike our own:
  
  *^*^*
  
  "Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. "The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world."
  
  "And Keynes's Londoner "regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement ... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ... appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice."
  
  "But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability, depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of generations to put it back together."
  
  *^*^*
  
  Why was this particularly striking to me?
  
  Well, there's a sub-set of those who believe in peak oil who also clearly think that industrial society cannot exist without oil. One loud exponent of this view is Jim Kunstler, and he's expressed it in his nominally non-fiction book "The Long Emergency" and his novel "World Made By Hand." He says at the web site for the novel that one of his main goals was to provide a "credible" scenario for our future. So he shows us a world about 15 years from now (or as far into the future as we are from 1993) -- that has been ravaged by disease, has had a complete economic and political breakdown, has no real communication other than by foot or horse, etc., etc. In other words, he posits a world at about 1830's levels of tech in about 15 years.
  
  And he calls this "credible."
  
  So, what about the Keynes quotes up there from Krugman? Well, the Age of Oil really began with the gusher that was found at Spindletop, Texas, in 1901. But it took a long time for oil to percolate through society. The world Keynes is describing is one without oil.
  
  But, notably, it's one *with* industry.
  
  And that's the largest problem I have with the with the most pessimistic among the peak oil crowd. I'm willing to give them their premises regarding oil production itself. Although, if Hubbert, Deffeyes, Campbell, and others are to be believed, that means a symmetrical curve. Just as I remember Keynes' London, I also recall the US of the 1950's, which was when the interstates and the suburbs were first being built -- and that was with global oil production of roughly what one would expect in the 2060's if we're at peak now.
  
  What this goes to is what Patrick Nielsen Hayden once described as the real surprise the Boomers got -- they never expected to live this long. That wasn't just because of shooting their collective wad so young. It's because they were told, incessantly, throughout their youth that either they'd go up in nuclear smoke, or a population crisis, or an environmental one. And now they're in their 60s, and they're not dead yet. Heck, they're more prosperous than they ever thought possible.
  
  Kunstler gets to sounding like that a lot. Just like there are some who (mostly jokingly) complain about not having their jet packs, Kunstler comes across as complaining as not having his apocalypse yet.
  
  I'm willing to give him peak oil. But that means a rollback to 1910 or so, at worst.
  
  But he's a moralist at heart. Which means his beef isn't really with petroleum, or even the car suburb he so soundly excoriates, it's with industrial society as a whole. So he overreaches, and becomes, well...
  
  Not credible.
  
  One of the disturbing things about this science fiction novel (Kunstler vigorously resists this label, but hey -- it quacks like sf, it waddles like sf, it sheds feathers like sf) is how poor the world-building is. This wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't that the world-building is the point.
  
  The Guardian recently had an article about a kid who's managed to build a wind turbine for UK£20. One of the "features" of Kunstler's scenario is that there's no electricity. This is particularly strange when one considers that Kunstler sets his story in a clear cognate to his home of Saratoga Springs, which gets most of its power from Niagara's hydro plant, which has no vulnerability to oil, peak or otherwise. Rather than mention Niagara even once in the book, Kunstler focuses instead on the number of small hydro plants that've been dismantled regionally, and mills as well. But compared to the over 2500 megawatts of Niagara, anything local is probably a rounding error.
  
  My point, though, is that the UK£20 wind turbine was developed specifically for places with limited infrastructure, and is mostly made from scrap. Kunstler realizes his post-oil world is full of scrap -- but apparently no one has the initiative needed to build such objects on their own. No, they don't behave like human beings in the real world, they just drown in their passivity because the author needs them to so he can make his polemical point. This is known as "bad writing."
  
  Similarly, he posits that not even bicycles can exist. because, you know, bicycles use rubber tires, and without oil you can't either make synthetic rubber or transport natural rubber. Which is true, but irrelevant. Bicycles existed from 1817 to the 1870s without rubber tires. In fact, you can still find bikes with wooden wheels around the globe.
  
  However, even all this can be laid aside because... well, no oil, no gasoline, yes? So, rusting hulks of cars dotting the landscape, yes? Each and every one of them sitting on top of four wheels lined by...
  
  Rubber.
  
  Again, Kunstler rubs the reader's nose in how this new world requires fiendish ingenuity when it comes to salvaging the detritus of industrialism.
  
  But not, you know, *too much* ingenuity. Like using a substance surrounding them.
  
  Treating your characters like marionettes, just to prove a point. I sure am glad a sophisticated literary novelist would never resort to such cheap genre hackery.
  
  Another aspect of the poor world-building in this cautionary science fiction novel: Its all-or-nothing-at-all nature.
  
  One of the things Kunstler posits is that a) the United States' government as we know it will mostly disappear, since it won't be able to exert power over distance, and b) nothing will take its place except in the extreme local sense -- local large landowners who will be proto-aristocrats with proto-serfs, local anarchy, etc.
  
  This shows (as do the other points above) a profound ignorance of history.
  
  One of the things that governments do, in living memory no less, is ration things. Whether one is talking about the various rationing measures in the US during WWII, or "austerity Britain" after the war, or even as far back as Mesopotamian city-states -- governments ration scarce commodities, and keep the share needed to maintain power for themselves.
  
  In this way, Walter Tevis' "The Steps of the Sun" is far more realistic than Kunstler. It too shows a world of dwindling resources, but it also shows a US government that manages to maintain supersonic fighters -- at the end of the barrel of a gun.
  
  There's also just human nature at work. I've said before that Leopold Kohr's "The Breakdown of Nations" continues to be one of the most prophetic works of the 20th Century. Even if you grant Kunstler that the federal government would "wither away," to serve his polemic point, the likelihood is quite strong that the US would split up into a series of regional nations. (Which is what the states nominally are, but hey.) It's not as if US Grant and the Army of the Potomac will come along to force them back together. (Or, if they did, it would prove how wrong the idea of diminished Federal power is.)
  
  But that splintering shows another problem -- Kunstler portrays a US which is uniformly on the skids, "powerless" in the literal black-out sense.
  
  Given his background as an amateur urban critic, you'd think Kunstler had read Jane Jacobs. And, if so, you'd think he'd know about her idea that any given national economy is really the sum of individual urban economies (see her "The Economy of Cities")
  
  Assuming that the larger regional cities would become primate capital cities of new splinter nations, I suggest that they would have a wide variety of outcomes. Seattle, where I live, gets 90% of its electricity from hydro, and another 9% from other non-fossil sources. In our region, I imagine Vancouver and Portland have similar non-petroleum sourcing.
  
  I don't know the strengths and weaknesses of other cities. But this region's cities in particular are fairly well off compared to others if it comes to the great darkness Kunstler foresees.
  
  And that's the problem. In the same way J. M. Straczynski used to make fun of some science fiction series for portraying the species of any given planet as being uniform, without ethnic, sectarian, or other divisions, Kunstler's attempts to make the entire world one vast homogeneous passive pity party are absolutely laughable. Even in the nightmare scenario he gives to himself, there will be winners, losers, and imbalances of outcome.
  
  
  
• Kunstler gets a little wierd on us
  By A347CAWHG4VWIY on 2008-03-31
  James Howard Kunstler, when he is on his "A" game, is a great writer. He can be provocative, irreverent, boisterous, yet hone in on largely obscure, but critically important truths at the same time.
  
  "World Made by Hand" is not Kunstler's "A" effort. It is a novel and is Kunstler getting wierd, projecting perhaps his sexual fantasies of getting laid by other men's wives and widows, mixing it up with crazy religious cults out of hell, and killing to survive.
  
  Killing to survive seems the most Kunstler-like concept out of the whole book. Who wants to hear about Alpha Male preachers leading itenerate flocks to funerals of strangers and taking over the religious services? I don't! Who wants to hear about middle aged men servicing their best friend's wife in order to keep morale up in a high stress environment? I don't. Who wants to hear almost everybody but the protagonist described as a flawed, inadequate loser? I don't! Who wants to learn the name of every herb and roadside flower that might be found in upstate New York, and the name of every folk tune that might be resurrected when radio and rock and roll is but a distant memory? I don't!
  
  This book could be so much better if written by Kunstler at his best. Perhaps the pressure of creating a novel under some sort of deadline pressure forced Mr. Kunstler to get wierd in order to complete the book and he relied on his thesaurus and Farmer's Almanac for inspiration.
  
  This book was a huge disappointment and I couldn't wait for it to end, despite desperately looking forward to it before my purchase.
  
  Maybe the next effort will make up for this disaster.
  
  
  Stan Moore
  Petaluma, CA
  
  
• the love scense were atrocious
  By A3U5LBWHXZQ1RG on 2008-05-25
  Kuntsler's essays are always pleasurable to read, full of big words, acerbic wit, and insight. This novel isn't one of them. It plods along, creating more yawns than anything I've read in the last ten years. It's only redeeming value is for keeping on the nightstand as a cure for insomnia. The plot and pacing never gets off the ground, and he never develops any of his characters enough for the reader to love them or hate them. The action is really dull, and after slogging thru chapter after chapter, it concludes with the time-worn, supernatural, deus ex machina.
  (Boy, was I pissed!)
  
  I don't know if it was by design or default, but World Made by Hand is written at an eight grade level, and the sex scenes are particularly adolescent. I'm not sure this is intended or not, and after reading several such fumblings, I was left wondering if Kuntsler had ever kissed a girl? Of the many "encounters" that we are privy to, none are longer than half a page, and as a reader, I began imagining new plot enhancements: the Russians released some kind of sexual-dysfunction bio-weapon. Now all the males in the post peak-oil world are now suffering from pre-ejaculation, and any hope for a rekindling of our civilization is doomed! Frighting stuff indeed.
  
  
  
  
  
• Disappointing
  By A273Q54RS1S97M on 2008-06-02
  I expected so much more from Kunstler. The first but not sharpest disappointment is his writing. Endless, pointless, flat dialogue. Page after page of pointless chatter between insubstantial characters.
  
  The greater disappointment is Kunstler's absence of imagination and inability to see beyond his own limited perspective. The men are grumpy and tough and white. The women are of no importance. As a culture, deprived of oil, we've reverted to a powered-down 1950s America. There is no subtlety of vision here. No creative questioning.
  
  Rarely has a civilization simply gone backwards, but this is all the Kunstler offers us in this painfully dull pulp fiction.
  
  
• The Dweebs Shall Inherit the Earth
  By A2B9Y0WXNSN17U on 2008-07-29
  Kunstler has done great work in nonfiction, particularly with the possible political and practical ramifications for post-consumerist civilization in "The Long Emergency." Here he has explored the aftermath in the form of a novel, with underwhelming results. There are probably thousands of post-apocalyptic novels in the literary world, most notably in science fiction and horror, in which writers explore how regular folks would survive the collapse of modern civilization's conveniences and social support systems. If you've read even a tiny percentage of the novels in that sub-genre, you will find nothing compelling about Kunstler's vision. He doesn't even really explore the ramifications of his favorite nonfiction subjects like peak oil and climate change, and instead sets up this novel with poorly-defined terrorist attacks and epidemics that wipe out America beyond the borders of a small town in upstate New York.
  
  With everyone besides genteel middle-aged upstaters conveniently out of the picture, the world Kunstler constructs in this novel is laughable. Formerly pampered upper middle-class office workers have transcended the practical necessities of carpentry and craftsmanship by completely regressing into social customs and belief systems from a bygone era. Other reviewers are correct in criticizing the status of women (servitude) and minorities (completely missing) in this fantasy world. Kunstler's society here is a strange mix of Amish village and hippie commune, built on the fantasies of 60 year-old former hippies who still can't understand why their utopia of hemp and free love didn't miraculously emerge back in 1969. Instead of a plausible dystopia based on Kunstler's solid nonfiction research, what we actually have here is a utopia for white upper-middle-class baby boomers (men only) wishing for the good old days that never were.
  
  Meanwhile, the book is populated by hollow and stereotypical characters, with genteel prose that sometimes collapses into forced poignancy like the cringe-inducing "her hair was full of the spice of fresh grass and childbearing." Kunstler's prose often slows down with annoying lists of names, plants, and foods. The plotline remains fairly plausible until falling apart at the end, with an unexplained supernatural deus ex machina that doesn't remotely fit with the attempted realism of the rest of the book. It's as if Kunstler envisioned an 800-page epic but got bored and abruptly cut off the story, or his agent said he could make more money with a trilogy. Either way, Kunstler's nonfiction is much better, [~doomsdayer520~]
  
  
• Nope. It is NOT a realistic depiction, nor is it a good read!
  By A2FWFTK6FYXM1 on 2008-10-04
  To mix metaphors - I had great expectations and instead found a shipwreck on the island of apathy.
  
  First, I will give credit where due - the protagonist is well described and I can empathize with his feelings, depression and apathy. That's basically it for the positive.
  
  It's as if Kunstler did a minimal bit of research and then zero critical thinking on how a society would revert to a more primitive form of social organization once the technological foundation of that modern society was completely removed.
  
  The entire premise of the story revolves around apathy - personal and societal. I find that not only abhorrent, but also unrealistic. If - or maybe it's when - our technology and oil based society fails because of lack of cheap oil and its benefits - travel - long and short distance, cheap heat, chemicals, electrical generation etc., we will find alternatives - whether it's coal derivatives, electrical or some other technology that will only be viable when oil is expensive and scarce.
  
  Does this mean that society will keep up its frenetic pace of change and "progress"? Not at all. Especially if one adds into the mix terrorists with nukes and rampant epidemics that destabilize world society and kill hundreds of millions, if not billions. Society will most likely have to revert to an earlier era where technology is much simpler and supportable for those needs that are "Made by Hand". But that does not mean that some semblance of `modern' technology won't remain and be maintained as viable - steam trains is but one example.
  
  Another example - Kunstler has most (an implied ~99%) of the cars recycled for their steel. Ok, not a bad idea if there isn't any gasoline from foreign oil fields being imported any longer. But... it's fairly simple to convert a gas engine to run on alcohol or even "wood gas" (Google that and you'll be amazed). So there'll be some sort of short range transportation made possible by individuals with an engineering proclivity. Will this sort of thing be wide spread like today's trucks and autos? Not likely nor practical. But it will exist in some form. Why? My answer is human nature. Find the unknown and unworkable and make it work.
  
  Another glaring hole in my opinion is the fact the Kunstler allows the electricity to come on at random intervals and for short random times. If trains, planes and automobiles are non-functioning and non-existent, then where the heck are the electrical generators in this grand scheme? If society can't make a wood fired steam train work, how can a complex power grid be maintained? If apathy is the watchword of the decade, then who the heck is climbing the power poles to connect the power lines? Furthermore, if most of the trucks and autos have been recycled for their metal content, why haven't the power lines been recycled for their copper and aluminum content? I can't willingly suspend my disbelief to cover that large and glaring of a gap.
  
  Guns. Though never specified, it's implied that this story takes place 10 to 15 years after a `crash' where the whole world just stops functioning. Given the number of guns in America in 2008, given the rural setting depicted in the story, the near absence and rarity of guns is one more point where it appears that Kunstler has discarded critical thinking. Even though the population has been devastated by virulent disease, gun violence seems out of the norm and relatively rare. Rare enough to shock the protagonist when it appears early in the narrative. I'd posit that regardless of the number of people that succumbed to the uncontrolled diseases, gangs of thugs would have been, or are still, ravaging the country far and wide, scrounging for food, more guns and women to rape. Survivors would have had to deal with these gangs of thugs time and again - or be killed by them. I would suggest that violence would remain distasteful to thinking and feeling humans, but it would not be as shocking as Kunstler has portrayed it.
  
  I could detail a half-dozen other oversights or outright goofs, but suffice to say that this was not an enjoyable post-apocalyptic story. Way too many gaps of logic to be remotely probable. And for my money that's what makes these sorts of tales enjoyable or not. And this one was not either probable or enjoyable.
  
  
  
• Great vignettes, weak plotting
  By A5A5NF16EEZUH on 2008-03-03
  Jim Kunstler is a marvelously acute observer of the decline of suburban America. He is above all a moralist, perhaps the greatest of our era, a kind of dyspeptic Voltaire with a hidden sympathy for religious sincerity. He's different from many other "peak oilers" in that his fulminations are driven not so much by techno-anxiety as by a righteous wrath against a postmodern America that is so used to getting something for nothing--huge energy inputs from cheap but finite resources--that its economy and moral fibre have rotted from the inside out. So there he sits in regal isolation in Saratoga Springs, predicting economic and cultural collapse with a certain schadenfreude. And it looks like he's pretty much right.
  
  With this said, one can argue that Kunstler is more a journalist with real stylistic flair than he is an essayist or a novelist. His long essay *The Long Emergency* was, as has been noted elsewhere, marred by a total lack of decent footnotes and bibliography--not to mention index. This is not a mere pedantic quibble: a work of the type he was writing would have much more value if readers can use it as a springboard for further reading. Not to cite sources fully and clearly is perhaps to be expected in a magazine article, but not in an authoritative book. In this novel we have another problem: many intriguing plot strands which are never fully resolved. This is really a picaresque novel, but it signals to us all along that it is a thriller--so we are bound to be disappointed. Brother Jobe's religious collective has some sort of Queen Bee in the middle of it, who apparently is going to try to use our hero to breed more members--or so it seems to be suggested. There is no follow through. There is a kind of feudal plantation on the outside of town--the basis for a war with the townies? The conflict is never developed. There is a horrid torture of our hero's preacher friend by a bunch of ex-bikers on the outside of town (a brillliantly, savagely written scene)--but nothing ever comes of the simmering war (the leader of the band is killed, and the conflict fizzles). Above all, the larger meditation on the necessity of law in a resolutely local, post-centralized world seems promised at a number of points, but never comes through. If Kunstler wants to write a best-seller, he needs to hone his plotting skills (read more Grisham?). If he doesn't care about writing a best-seller, fine, but then he should develop the implicit meditation on the fate of law in a world in which anarchy is as much a threat as a promise. And then he would have to do some serious research, with footnotes...
  
  It's worth noting that many "peak oilers" use the coming economic meltdown as a way of justifying a return to a small, non-hierarchical society--what used to be called "anarchism" (in the good sense). If we can't justify it politically, in an era of prosperity, than we can certainly justify it in practical terms in an era of post-plenty. This is the approach of Bill McKibben and Richard Heinberg. What they're really interested in is the anarchism (small scale, frugal local economy, vibrant community), and peak oil analysis is a useful way of getting there. Kunstler does an interesting variation on this when he stresses the legal and moral complexities of a world that will have to embrace extreme localism because it will have no other choice. The sweet dreams of anarchism à la McKibben are supplemented in Kunstler by an awareness that a local, low-energy world may very well also spawn feudalism and thug rule. This is an invaluable contribution to the debate.
  
  
• A wasted opportunity
  By AMF4KV0RKJJYA on 2008-04-06
  :-( I have to say this was a big dissapointment. Many of the other reviews here at this lower end of the scale have hit the nail on the head, so I will not repeat too many points.
  
  At no point did I find myself immersed in the story. It just feels very shallow and, towards the end, laughable. Let me say I am a huge fan of Kunstler's various non-fiction musings and columns. He always strikes me as spot on and is enormously entertaining. This, however, is anything but.
  
  For the growing numbers of us who have heard and understood the peak-oil message and are grappling with the enormity of it's implications, this has to feel like a huge wasted opportunity.
  
  IMHO, there is a real need for a quality, dramatic fictional story based in fact that will help to crystalise comprehension and raise awareness. I thought this would be it but it really is anything but.
  
  There were a few moments in the book where I thought 'wow. it's the little things I havent even considered.' As an example - using old fashioned wooden wheels on trailers and the like, because we have no way of manufacturing the complex adhesives need for puncture repair. It's the accumulation of a million little things like that that are going to floor us, IMHO. But, these moments are few and far between.
  
  It just doesnt feel remotely like there are enough remnants from the current era... example... apparently a massive chunk of the population was wiped out by a flu... and this is recent enough that people described as 'young' can remember 'the old days' ... yet, despite the short time that has evidently passed, people are using chunks of old tyres tied onto their feet as shoes. Why the hell isn't there a stockpile of dead people's shoes to choose from? They should be walking around in Nikes. Far more realistic. There is, in fact, so little remnant of 'the old days' that it might as well be a period piece. If it was supposed to be 300 years after the event, then maybe this would feel accurate.
  
  In short, this story largely fails to be believable as set within a couple of decades of the start of 'the long emergency'.
  
  
  
  
• interesting...
  By A9XW652JGXWDF on 2008-04-16
  I saw this book at the bookstore, then read the reviews here and had decided not to read it, then found it on the new shelf at the library and brought it home. I found it interesting enough to finish. But:
  
  I am horrified by the book's editing. It has missing commas, a comma in place of a period, a misplaced apostrophe, but mostly, it is missing nearly every question mark. An author cannot write pages of dialogue rife with "What" questions and leave out the question marks. By the time I finished reading the book, I wanted to come after the author himself with a red pen.
  
  The book has other flaws: odd characters (the prophetess), odd occurances (the identical deaths). The writing has other flaws, too: Kunstler likes to take a paragraph and list every single dish brought to a wake, or every single song played at a get-together, or every single whatever.
  
  I think the book is worth reading, if you're interested in apocalyptic fiction or living off the land, but it is not nearly as good as it could have been, minus the supernatural elements and with a good editor.
  
  
• There is a future after all.
  By AJYKAOWG26E98 on 2008-02-19
  I read "The Long Emergency" and I am a devoted follower of Kunstler's column on his web page so I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel. I was more than pleasantly surprised at how quickly I became wrapped up in the characters in this story. It will make you look at the world around you differently as you try to imagine how you would cope without all of the things that you take for granted. It all boils down (pun intended) to energy. All forms of it. From oil to electricity to wood heat to human and animal labor. Those of us that make it through this inevitable and painful reorganization will have to be resourceful in ways we never imagined. But some of us will make it. And life will go on without all of the clutter.
  If you're not sure about all of the discussions about Peak Oil and it's consequences, this book is an excellent way to ease into it and start thinking seriously about your future and your children's future.
  Highly recommended.
  
  
• A great read
  By A24NO9MFM9F0BZ on 2008-02-23
  James Kunstler's (http://www.kunstler.com/) novel World Made by Hand is about the end of the world as we know it; it's a must-read, and I hope everyone I know reads it so we can have a big argument about it!
  
  In the near future (by around 2015, it would seem) both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence of this, oil no longer flows to the USA, and therefore fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, petroleum-fueled vehicles, and, generally, modern life, are all swiftly defunct. The power grid comes on only a half-hour a day; the only radio transmissions are the rantings of preachers. The Internet has become a fairy tale.
  
  The story focuses on a small upstate New York town that has the good fortune to have its water supply gravity-fed, and to be populated by a number of residents skilled in the essentials of nineteenth-century living: a doctor, a dentist, a minister, a carpenter, etc. Despite the great changes in the world, they live on. Their population has been decimated though, from flu and encephilitus.
  
  The novel explores the kinds of groups that populate this new world. There are roughly six factions: First there are the townspeople: the remnants of a middle class and "normal" life: the novel is narrated by Robert Earle, who was once a manager at a Boston-based high tech firm. Robert has lost his family to illness. Then there is a Mr. Bullock, who is a de facto plantation master, whose peasants work for him in exchange for stability and a top-down collective economy; Bullock has accomplished some remarkable things, such as getting a small hydro generator going. Another group is the hive-like New Faith Brotherhood, led by Brother Jobe -- they've arrived recently from Pennsylvania, which they have fled due to race-based fighting among the refuges from D.C. and Baltimore. Wayne Karp is the top dog in Karpstown, a loose-knit cabal of scavengers who live near the town dump, which they excavate for spare parts from the past. Further afield in Albany is Mr. Curry, who runs the docks. Finally, there are those who live outside these groups in isolation.
  
  What Kunstler does is spin these characters and groups into a ripping yarn that wouldn't be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel by Twain or Dickens. There are a couple of levels to this: At the level of individual characters, the novel is a bit of a soap opera, with hair-raising escapes, romance, sentimentality, tears and even some laughs. All this will keep you turning the page. There's also some solid scene-painting of the post-oil remnants:
  
  The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. (p. 166)
  
  On another level, though, he's posing a great sociological question: Can civilization survive after this disaster? What combinations of these groups might balance one another into a kind of stability? It's a little hard to know how serious Kunstler is in this orchestration, because the last few chapters of the novel veer into some weird territory. But I don't want to give away the ending. For exploring social organization through fiction, he's right up there with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and I'm a sucker for this kind of speculative fiction that works its way through problems via believable characters.
  
  Some readers are going to wonder how the world could go to pieces so quickly after the destruction of two cities. After all, the United States has recently suffered the partial destruction of New Orleans, an important port city. But Kunstler knows whereof he speaks: He's the author of an important book The Long Emergency which is about the consequences of "peak oil" that moment when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached, and it becomes increasingly hard to get it out of the ground and run society. If even 1/10 of what Kunstler reports in The Long Emergency comes to pass, then the story of World Made by Hand won't be fiction, it will be fact.
  
  Kunstler was born in the late 40s, so he came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that amused me . . . somewhat . . . is that once the power goes off, people revert to a stereotype of . . . hippies! There's a lot of pot-smoking, long hair, and mate-swapping; taste in music tends towards folk. A brief mention is made of "Smells like Teen Spirit," but the characters in the novel make fun of it. I wondered at times if Kunstler was having a bit of satire with his melodrama.
  
  But this is just quibbling. It's a good book, and if you believe "it can't happen here," then go read The Long Emergency as a followup.
  
  
  
• Little House on the Prarie meets Peak Oil
  By A17PJY5YTUU799 on 2008-02-24
  Having read all of Kunstler's non-fiction, but none of his fiction, I eagerly awaited "World Made By Hand". I was not disappointed. This is a great read that fills a pressing need. It's not enough to talk about peak oil, resource depletion, deindustrialization, global warming, etc. in mere technical or economic terms. These are not floating abstractions. Human beings are going want to go on living through these crises, and it's helpful to know how we might do it. Watching fictionalized characters cope with an unpleasant reality that was thrust upon them allows us to more fully comprehend and accept how we might exist in this strange and frightening world.
  
  Kunstler's characters are likeable and emotionally accessible. Their quandaries (material and spiritual) are comparable to what we might experience in similar situations. Kunstler is kind to his characters without being obsequious. Some, as might be expected, can't cope anymore and exit this world. Those who remain and thrive do so by discarding their illusions. Thankfully, humor has survived and love, loyalty, friendship and meaning are still possible.
  
  There is no explicit ideological agenda here - just ordinary people trying to survive and make sense of their losses. One senses that ideology itself has become just another useless vestige of the Industrial Age. Religion reasserts itself as a source of meaning and order. However, it does not dominate and Enlightenment values persist.
  
  I'm not looking forward to living in the "world made by hand" described in this book. However, my personal preferences with respect to the future are practically irrelevant. We may not have ordained or wished for Kunstler's "world", but it is the logical consequence of the choices we are making today.
  
  
  
• Are you kidding me?
  By AI8MBRSBC4FUG on 2008-03-02
  Loose ends at the end. A rush job near the end and where is nuclear winter? If and when the bombs go off life will never even be close to what the author is saying...geez..what a waste of precious time. Don't bother with this one.
  
  
• This is the Amish version of Mad Max
  By A22GI19EJ3UWXH on 2008-02-24
  I've been a fan of James Howard Kunstler's work for about a year now. He's always interesting in interviews and short non-fiction environmental work, so it's no surprise this book delivers a solid read.
  
  One of the most refreshing things about this book is that it does two things that most eco-pocalypse books do not: it takes place on the East coast and it shows a religious basis for a community that is not rooted in recycled and lukewarm Native American spiritualism.
  
  Seriously, every damn other book I've read about this stuff takes place in Northern Californian and assumes that without electricity, people are just going to naturally adopt an Earth based religion (The City Not Long After, Earth Abides, The Scarlet Plague, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and to a certain extent Ecotopia, all share elements of these two things).
  
  For the record, I live in San Francisco, so I'm pretty okay with Nor Cal as a setting and a bunch of hippy stuff, I'm just thrilled to see something different.
  
  I really enjoyed reading this book, even if the tone does sometimes slip into the smug and off putting Rhetoric of the Locavore movement(well parodied in an episode of South Park). Sure, people are going to probably be healthier and whatnot once the Industrial Age's carcass starts rotting, but can you really consider Metallica's Creeping Death to be the ultimate symbol of Industrial excess and Capitalist destruction (read the book and you will understand this question)?
  
  After reading this book, I decided it's time to hoard some ammunition and learn a practical trade like blacksmithing. Well, to be honest, I had decided that long before, but this book stokes the flames of those desires.
  
  
• All Purpose Disaster Book
  By A1254CS3IZO350 on 2008-04-22
  Not a bad book, but not too relevant either. Sort of a disaster book, but it could have been any kind of disaster from a plague to nuclear war. I really wanted a book that discussed the winding down of the current energy intensive culture, not one about what happens after it has occurred.
  
  The more I read and listen to JHK, the more I'm convinced he's just becoming a grumpy old man. Very little creativity in this book and little relevance to the issue of peak energy.
  
  DR
  
  

• The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
• Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)
• Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
• When All Hell Breaks Loose
• Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (New Society Publishers)