World Made by Hand: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Howard Kunstler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 11, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kunstler's name is mostly associated with nonfiction works like The Long Emergency, a bleak prediction of what will happen when oil production no longer meets demand, and the antisuburbia polemic The Geography of Nowhere. In this novel, his 10th, he visits a future posited on his signature idea: when the oil wells start to run dry, the world economy will collapse and society as we know it will cease. Robert Earle has lost his job (he was a software executive) and family in the chaos following the breakdown. Elected mayor of Union Grove, N.Y., in the wake of a town crisis, Earle must rebuild civil society out of squabbling factions, including a cultish community of newcomers, an established group of Congregationalists and a plantation kept by the wealthy Stephen Bullock. Re-establishing basic infrastructure is a big enough challenge, but major tension comes from a crew of neighboring rednecks led by warlord Wayne Karp. Kunstler is most engaged when discussing the fate of the status quo and in divulging the particulars of daily life. Kunstler's world is convincing if didactic: Union Grove exists solely to illustrate Kunstler's doomsday vision. Readers willing to go for the ride will see a frightening and bleak future. (Mar.)
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Review

''Richly imagined.'' --O, The Oprah Magazine

''Far from a typical postapocalyptic novel. . . An impassioned and invigorating tale whose ultimate message is one of hope, not despair.'' -San Francisco Chronicle

''Brilliant.'' --Chicago Tribune

''World Made by Hand is an end-of-days novel that is more a pleasure than a burden to read.'' --Baltimore City Paper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1St Edition edition (February 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871139782
• ISBN-13: 978-0871139788
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (214 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #449,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Howard Kunstler is probably best known as the author of "The Long Emergency" (The Atlantic Monthly Press 2005), and "The Geography of Nowhere" (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Two other non-fiction titles in that series are "Home From Nowhere" (Simon and Schuster, 1996), and "The City in Mind" (Simon and Schuster, 2002). He's also the author of many novels, including his tale of the post-oil American future, "World Made By Hand" (The Atlantic Monthly press, 2008). The sequel will be published in the fall of 2010. His shorter work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and many other periodicals.

James Howard Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He attended New York's High School of Music and art and SUNY Brockport (BA, Theater, 1971). He was a reporter for the Boston Phoenix, the Albany Knickerbocker News, and later an editor with Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975 he dropped out of corporate journalism to write books, and settled in Saratoga Spring, New York, where he has lived ever since.

Kunstler's popular blog, Clusterf**k Nation, is published every Monday morning at www.kunstler.com and his weekly podcast, The KunstlerCast, is refreshed every Thursday.

Kunstler is also a serious professional painter. His work may be seen at www.kunstler.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

369 of 390 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Slipping through our fingers February 20, 2008

By Scott Meredith VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

135 of 143 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The apocalypse as bittersweet April 7, 2008

By Kerry Walters VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.

72 of 78 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars well-done apocalyptic contrast to mccarthy's road February 25, 2008

By David W. Straight

Format:Hardcover

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.