World Made by Hand: A Novel

World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler

World Made by Hand: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: James Howard Kunstler
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-11
ISBN: 0871139782
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Book Reviews of World Made by Hand: A Novel

Book Review: It's Better than "The Long Emergency"
Summary: 2 Stars

... because it's in the fiction section. That's no small distinction.

However, it has pretty much the exact same problem that "TLE" has: halfway through the book, things start sliding downhill, and by the end, you wonder what the hell happened.

Things start off pretty well. It's a funny hybrid between historical fiction and sci-fi, but hey, I'm usually up for something new. The descriptions of food and food economy are great.

But... why do the musicians play music I've never heard of, and hate "Smells Like Teen Spirit," when it seems like they'd be from my generation or even younger? (I'm 30, and still seeing teenagers in Nirvana tshirts.) How does the water still work without electricity? (Yes, I know it's gravity fed- I live in a town with 19th century gravity fed water, and guess what, when the power goes out here, so does the water.)
The questions just get weirder. Why do the women and laborers accept second class status without even a peep, as if egalitarian democracy just never existed? Why did Brother Jobe and his lakeys forcibly shave the townspeople? Why did Minor and Karp die from identical wounds? Why is it important that Robert Earle was born Erlich and really Jewish? Why did Loren get tortured, literally, when Robert just got doused in poo?
And WHAT is the deal with the Queen Bee? None of these questions get answered, and, more to the point, the reader is left asking why they got asked in the first place, as they don't seem to add anything to the story.

It's disappointing, because this book had some momentum going before things started to get really out there. I was interested in thinking about daily life without wheat, and with hens in everyone's backyard. But I was left numbed by how... well, how dumb everything got. It's like he was in a terrible rush to finish, and just stopped writing rather than actually bothering to complete the story.

Summary of World Made by Hand: A Novel

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.

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