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49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comment on scene of child performing an appendectomy, August 28, 2010
This review is from: The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel (Hardcover)
This long-awaited novel, the sequel to "World Made By Hand," is a riveting read. Mr. Kunstler has always been a fine writer, as manifest in his well-known nonfiction such as "The Geography of Nowhere" and "The Long Emergency." "The Witch of Hebron" is the culmination of Mr. Kunstler's craft as a writer and social critic. The text flows like sweet honey with a lyricism that is breathtaking.
As a physician, there is one scene that particularly resonated with me: a boy, presumably a teenager though I don't believe his age is ever stated, performs an appendectomy under primitive circumstances in a remote farmhouse. Readers may believe that Kunstler has gone over-the-top with this scenario, that it could never happen in real life. Actually, this scene is completely authentic, compelling, and anatomically accurate to the smallest detail.
Could it ever happen, could a child observe surgeries performed by a parent nowadays, and sufficiently often to perform those surgeries by himself? Yes, it can and is happening. I know that for a fact because one of my colleagues often has his son in the operating room with him while operating at a major university hospital. I suspect the child's presence violates hospital rules but that doesn't stop the son from watching his father operate. The son will someday become a surgeon himself, exactly as the boy (Jasper) in Kunstler's imagined world.
There may be more verisimilitude to this scene than even Kunstler imagined when he wrote it.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Future of Trout, September 8, 2010
This review is from: The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel (Hardcover)
It seems novelists aren't writing about the present as much. Perhaps because it takes such a long time to write a novel. Who wants to spend years writing a novel that's irrelevant by the time it's published. In the nineteenth century (think Tolstoy) novelists wrote about the past, because the present was too uneventful. In the twenty-first century writers look to the future because the present is too eventful. For us the present is last week.
The Witch of Hebron imagines a near future following a nuclear attack on Washington D.C. and Los Angeles that plunges American society back into the nineteenth century, where people have do for themselves. Set in the future it is all about the past. In this upside down world computer programmers are civic leaders, car dealers are religious leaders, butchers are heroic hermits. Characters are seen stoically adapting to an agrarian lifestyle with no electricity, no gas for their SUV's, no groceries not produced locally, no TV or radio, no convenience. If you want to get somewhere you have to walk or borrow a horse or mule.
If you find this notion of the future totally ominous, you would be wrong. The story is not about Jasper and his adventures on the road. The main character in this story is our planet slowly healing itself from the excesses of the Industrial Age. It is redolent with sensual and mythic detail. Trout schooling in clear streams. Songbirds singing in the greenery of healthy trees. The air is clean and sweet. And it is quiet. No TV. No traffic. No telephones. Cuisines are simple, aromatic and healthy. There is a strong sense of both solitude and community. Gradually, except for a few gratuitous scenes of rough justice, a feeling grows in the reader that this is not such a bad way to live.
This is an important novel. The country cannot be reminded too often that the age of fossil fuel is over, maybe not next week, but soon. This near future is not something to fear. It is something to await with open arms.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Novel Pioneer Novel, November 9, 2010
I am a fan of James Kunstler. I find myself usually in agreement with his critiques of our society as expressed on his web site. I wanted to like The Witch of Hebron, just as I wanted to like its predecessor, World Made By Hand.
Unfortunately, my disbelief was not suspended long enough to permit unreserved enjoyment. Rather than bring his great knowledge of present technology and its possible consequences for the future to these novels, he has chosen to give us Little House on the Prairie. We are asked to believe that in less than a decade urbane citizens of the 21st century are suddenly transformed into people who name their babies Jasper, converse like Chester to Matt Dillon and are skilled and comfortable at the plow behind their mule.
The causes of this sudden transformation are given as a disastrous Middle Eastern war, the back side of Peak Oil, the ascendency of China and terrorist attacks against major U.S. cities, all of which have already happened or could easily occur again. Kunstler's easy answer is a return to the 19th century, complete with a shortage of horses. I would be more receptive to a future exhibiting a gradual backsliding of our society with responses and alternatives and accommodations being made all along the way until some equilibrium is achieved.
Some combination of 19th, 20th and 21st centuries would seem more plausible to me. For instance, Jim Kunstler, a confessed cyclist, never mentions the bicycle in his post-disaster world. Horses and mules are in, bicycles are out. I feel sure the bicycle, a product of the 1800s, would still be manufactured in one form or another. The millions of bikes now extant could be maintained long into the future. Unless the infrastructure and roads suddenly collapsed without hope of being maintained or repaired, bicycles would certainly be more practical everyday transportation than mules. I could see auto traffic greatly restricted, the death of malls and suburbia, the hasty revival of rail traffic, the dependence upon locally grown food, a great lessening of available energy and much less easy communications among communities. But the wholesale adoption of the 19th century without reference to anything since is not believable.
Another odd thing: The community in Kunstler's world has no interest beyond their immediate area, no curiosity about the state of the world. Not much attempt at trade or communication with others out of the area except some boat trade with Canada.
What else? Well, to me there was a curious deference given to the supernatural which seems out of character for Kunstler, the pragmatist. Maybe he's more spiritual than I thought.
This fan was disappointed.
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