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World Made by Hand: A Novel (Hardcover)

by James Howard Kunstler (Author) "Loren and I walked the railroad tracks along the river coming back from fishing the big pool under the old iron bridge, and I couldn't..." (more)
Key Phrases: Brother Jobe, Jane Ann, New Faith (more...)

3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (129 customer reviews)

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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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Kunstler displays a kind of macabre wit about the unpleasantness and strife that await us all....His assertions have a neat way of doubling back to anticipate your critiques. If you express doubt about his views, then you may well be among the deluded masses too addicted to your McSUV and McSuburb to accept that reality lies ahead."

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Product Details

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (February 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0871139782
ISBN-13: 978-0871139788
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (129 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #181,941 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Loren and I walked the railroad tracks along the river coming back from fishing the big pool under the old iron bridge, and I couldn't remember a lovelier evening before or after our world changed. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Brother Jobe, Jane Ann, New Faith, Wayne Karp, Union Grove, Brother Minor, Washington County, Dale Murray, Shawn Watling, Brother Joseph, Main Street, Stephen Bullock, Jerry Copeland, Dan Curry, Tom Allison, Salem Street, Heath Rucker, Andrew Pendergast, Todd Zucker, Terry Einhorn, Hudson River, Ben Deaver, Ned Larmon, Larry Prager, Bunny Willman

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	72% buy the item featured on this page: World Made by Hand: A Novel 3.5 out of 5 stars (129) $16.32
	8% buy The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century 3.9 out of 5 stars (225) $10.98
	8% buy One Second After 4.2 out of 5 stars (248) $15.89
	6% buy Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse 4.1 out of 5 stars (395) $10.17

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Customer Reviews

129 Reviews

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(13)

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3.5 out of 5 stars (129 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

191 of 201 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Scott Meredith "SeeOtter" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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50 of 52 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 (knoxville, tennessee United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

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.

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68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A low-key P/A novel
After grimacing through "The Road," this novel was a welcome relief. I gathered that the author didn't care for much in our modern American society, and that's alright, since... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Lupus

4.0 out of 5 stars Adventures of an honest man
Quite late in the story it is revealed, that Robert Earle, the narrator of the story is actually a Jew born as Robert Ehrlich. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Rorschach

3.0 out of 5 stars A Gentle New World
Never had I suspected that the breakdown of our world would be so inviting. I am a fan of post apocalyptic novels (I don't really want to know why) and have read quite a few... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Jeff Swystun

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book...excellent timing!
Although a fictional novel, this book was pretty relevant in giving us an idea of 'what if...' were to occur. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Jack Gonzalez

3.0 out of 5 stars A realistic if overly andro-centric (and therefore disappointing) tale
The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency are two of my very favorite books. They're clear, concise, and compelling. Read more

Published 2 months ago by J. Fiore

3.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing
I appreciate Kunstler's analysis of our built environment and our over-dependance on fossil fules, as his other work deals with. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Adam Jones

2.0 out of 5 stars This is a Ma-aaaan's Woooorld (a la James Brown)
I read this book just as an earlier reviewer had recommended --after reading The Road, World Made By Hand seemed more hopeful, less intent on indicting the human race. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Francoise

4.0 out of 5 stars A fast read, not too bad.
Enjoyable foray into the fictional end of our country. With the times we have had lately it is not hard to imagine an outcome such as this. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Noel C. Hastings

4.0 out of 5 stars A real look at what life could become
World Made By Hand is an easy to read account of what community means in times of economic and at least partial social collapse. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Karen Ghio

1.0 out of 5 stars tripe, and more tripe
the author follows the part line, the only difficulty is that the party line is mormon. a group who believe in burkas, only those worn under clothing, as is the infamous mormon... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Ann Romney

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