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Buy World Made by Hand: A Novel by James Howard Kunstler available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler
| | List Price: | $24.00 | | Price: | $16.32 | | You Save: | $7.68 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 2366 | | Studio: | Atlantic Monthly Press | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 336 | | Publication Date: | February 11, 2008 | | Publisher: | Atlantic Monthly Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what 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. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 74 reviews)
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Thought Provoking and an Absorbing Story 
I almost didn't buy this book despite having bought all of Kunstler's non-fiction books, going back to his early books on architecture and urban design. "So... he's written a novel... hmmmm..."
Is he the next Faulkner? Well, no, but this was actually one of the best novels I've read in the last year or two. He has a real command of the basics: a good story and interesting, realistic characters. The literary savants swooned over Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" for reasons I don't get at all -- cardboard characters wandering around in an utterly unrealistic world where absolutely nothing grows (folks, if something ever manages to kill the ferns, which survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, there aren't going to be any people wandering around).
What I enjoyed about this book is that it paints a quite realistic picture of a future that is at least somewhat probable. It makes you think (and boy, when it comes to our energy future, there's lots to think about) and draws you in to a very absorbing world which reflects Kunstler's deep knowledge of the area in upstate NY where he lives. And you care about the people in the book because they seem very much like the people you run into every day (the protagonist is obviously very loosely autobiographical).
The book this reminded me of was Kim Stanley Robinson's wonderful "The Wild Shore," a more depressing book by far, but one that also focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to make the best of a very strange and changed world.
"Hand Made World" also made me think about the fact that other than being a good cook, pretty much every skill I have would be utterly useless in the world Kunstler describes.
July 20, 2008 | |
Read and Share
This book is readable, but not great literature; however, it is a starting place for discussion. OK, I hate the metaphysical stuff at the end, it gets in the way of the message about the dangers of living in a peak oil world, excessive greenhouse gas emissions, pandemics, etc.
CNN recently made a 1-hour documentary called "Out of Gas, We Were Warned" that legitimizes the idea that possibly a perfect storm of events could turn our comfy, energy-rich world upside down, as it did in Kunstler's book.
I've read this book a couple of times and lent it out. No one wants to hear this message, but it is worthy of discussion and can provide an opening for bringing up a topic.
I would like to read a sequel, but please leave out the mumbo-jumbo, James.
July 20, 2008 | |
I truly enjoyed it! 
I grabbed a few books from the library and headed to the beach over the 4th. Three novels in four days, all with an apocalyptic bent. Maybe it wasn't five stars, but it certainly seemed that way after reading the other two...yikes!
You can read a summary of the plot elsewhere, but the condensed version is that we've taken a giant step back into the 18th century after the collapse of the Oil Age.
Plot twists aside, what I really enjoyed about the book was listening to Kunstlers' gentle writing voice. I was transported to a different, harder, world and I found that I liked it there! The scrabble for survival made me wonder whether I'd be up to the challenge, and I began to appreciate the themes of self-reliance that ran through the story. It reminded me of the slightly mystical feelings I experienced reading Thoreau and Emerson.
Plot wise? Maybe not that great. For me, the book was more about the journey than the destination. Worth a read.
July 09, 2008 | |
Even reality isn't this bad... 
The nay-sayers are right, don't bother. He can't write dialogue, he can't do character development and he certainly can't write sex scenes.
And, just like 'The Long Emergency' got weird at the end, predicting 'Asian Pirates' would descend upon the Pacific NW, the end of this book got nothing short of hallucinatorily strange with the 'hive' segment. What the hell?
Buy an old copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, Little House on the Prairie, and read Matt Savinar. You'll pretty much have what you need.
July 06, 2008 | |
kunstler should stick to blogging & stuff 
this book... well, sucked. i got it from the library and actually read it all the way through... but not so much because i was intrigued as because i didn't feel it was fair to rag on it without reading it first.
i am a BIG fan of kunstler and i read his blog regularly. i have found his nonfiction books to be truly enlightening (as well as well-written and actually funny) and have passed them along to numerous friends. i have plagued mr. kunstler with fan email. i take all of his predictions and warnings to heart. kunstler is a great writer... of nonfiction.
i tried once before to read one of his novels but couldn't get more than a couple pages in. given the topic of this book i was much more determined. and it's the subject matter that is this novel's only redeemable characteristic. kunstler has made a valiant attempt at fleshing out an image of a post-carbon world, one we're extremely likely to be actually living in, in the near future. i have no doubt about that. nor do i have much doubt about the plausibility of what he describes.
i do have doubts regarding why he bothers writing fiction when he's so bad at it.
other reviewers have noted that his characterizations are shallow... and that his descriptions of women rarely make it past their physical features. my chief complaint is that the dialogue is terrible. it's unrealistic and it's used as a very obvious vehicle for giving the reader information about the world they're visiting. "say, earle - don't you ever miss the old times, back when we used to have electricity & cars & stuff? now things are so hard, and our womenfolk can't hardly bear children... i miss cold beer." i paraphrase... but this is generally how it goes.
besides the crappy dialogue, there's a rather bizarre story arc. the main adventure of the story is over with halfway through, and the rest is just a jumbled mess of nearly pornographic depictions of people at their worst, giving in to their basest natures. except for the main character, who remains an upright citizen and as a reward is able to score a really young, petite li'l bride. nothing is said about how he deals with the woman he was previously banging, who was older but she made a fine jug o' wine.
i'm relieved to be done reading this book - it's due back at the library today and it's not worth paying a fine on. i hope that kunstler returns to what he's best at - nonfiction - and writes more books about our impending doom in the non-fiction way. i'll keep reading his blog.
if you're curious to know what kind of world he's created in this book but don't want to bother reading it, just imagine "little house on the prairie" set in a world where instead of endless prairie there are lots of former strip malls and the older people have almost dream-like memories of living in a world with cars and plasma TVs. that's really all you need to know.
July 05, 2008 | |
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