World Made by Hand: A Novel |  | Author: James Howard Kunstler
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  155 reviews
Sales Rank: 264597
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Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
ASIN: B0033AGSRI
Publication Date: January 6, 2009
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Product Description
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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 155
 Slipping through our fingers February 20, 2008
Scott Meredith
252 out of 265 found this review helpful
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.
well-done apocalyptic contrast to mccarthy's road February 26, 2008
David W. Straight (knoxville, tennessee United States)
59 out of 62 found this review helpful
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.
Vivid Depiction of Life in the Long Emergency February 9, 2008
Craig Monk (Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada)
50 out of 56 found this review helpful
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.
An Exciting, Intelligent Read February 13, 2008
Sarah Rainer
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
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.
There is a future after all. February 19, 2008
J. Laurich (Appleton, WI USA)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 155
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