World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler
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Book Reviews of World Made by Hand: A Novel
Book Review: A solid page turner. "Real?" "Accurate?", "Likely?". Possibly not. But fascinating.
Summary: 4 Stars
I initially followed a link from a short review of the book at [...].
I found the book very hard to put down. It produced one of those rare, late night, "reading marathon on a work night", finishes, for me.
I haven't read his prior work, "The Long Emergency". But for me the book stands well as a story on it's own. To be honest, based on common descriptions of his prior non-fiction efforts, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book had very few speeches. He has a perspective on where the world is heading. But he didn't deliver long screeds or build inordinate numbers of straw-men trying to drive you to agree with his view.
I'm a guy. So I wasn't offended at the first-person masculine viewpoint and the lack of "strong" well-rounded women characters. Yup, it was "subtley" sexist from end to end. So is alot of classic historical fiction. But I don't that limitation prevent me from enjoying a book. I say "subtle", from the perspective that he didn't rant that women were "lesser". He had women in "homemaker" roles, largely in the background of the story. From the character development angle, there were a large number of male and female characters that the author introduced and walked offstage without deep development. But I accepted them without criticism, because I read the book more as the journaled recollections of a single man in the book's world.
I wasn't reading for polemics or deep messages. I wasn't reading to root for his characters, or revel in snappy exchanges of dialog. My primary interest was in how the protagonist's world had changed. And the interesting ways that people had coped (or-not). On that level, the book delivered.
As to the "accuracy" of the book:
Will we run out of oil eventually? Absolutely.
Have we done little to prepare, in the US? Most would say yes.
Is the world economy subject to critical failures? A glance at the newspaper today makes it hard to say 'No'.
Are we at risk for widespread resistant flu strains that can travel across high speed vectors that didn't exist in 1918? No doubt.
Will all of the above occur together, to bring down the world in the way he describes? Probably not. But quite a few good reads have been written on depictions of, "the worst case".
The fact is, with the current state of energy, the economy, and world markets, it's hard not to put yourself into the book, and try to envision what state you & yours will find yourself in, down the road.
Heh, makes you want to take up carpentry.
Book Review: shoddy effort
Summary: 2 Stars
Kunstler's writing style has been described as ¨brutally eloquent¨ and ¨semi-gonzo¨ and that is what I look for. There is no evidence of it in this book. It seems like a job done too fast, too shallowly. Some of the ideas are half-baked: this town has a gravity water system which becomes part of the plot; what comes in must go out, what happens to the sewage? They have no chemicals for the inflow, so they hardly have any for the outflow. Do they just dump it all downriver? Another oddity: they have zero news. Where are the traveling tradespeople simple America used to be so full of, bringing salt from the coast, and regional news? None of these forlorn smalltown folks had the wit to put in a few solar pannels or a crank radio? What happened to all the ham radio or community radio or pirate radio people so active in our own world, forgot to get microhydro?
There is tremendous sadness permeating the book, understandably, as people count their losses over and over. But where is the fury? These people inhabit the scrabbling world of Homo scavenger, as far into the future as they can see. Don't they ever rave at those culprits who plundered the previous world and brought on the collapse? The only person who does a minor angry riff gets murdered right after.
The book carefully avoids any deeper musings. We are told that farmer Bullock has ¨a comprehensive vision of what was going on in our society¨ but we are never told what it is, nor why people call him a ¨dangerous man.¨ And is ¨surviving in comfort¨ the only vision in this world? How is that different from today?
The women are all either wives or helpmeets (except for a disgusting prophetess), and we are told that ¨egalitarian pretenses¨ have dissolved. Nothing else. Ha! The men have abdicated any efforts on behalf of the town's management, but the womenfolk just think about sex and homemade wine. Dream on, Mr Kunstler!
And not one of these people has any reflection to offer regarding why their world unraveled, nor any ideas how to prevent similar mistakes in the future. They are longing for the amenities of yesteryear, and the sense I have at the end of the book is that they will spend their future trying to recreate them as much as they can. Sad, really, and a waste of an interesting imagined world.
Then, towards the end, the two intelligent protagonists do something really stupid, just to further the plot. I hate that. The best part of the book is about the food: it is so squeaky fresh it made my mouth water.
Book Review: well-done apocalyptic contrast to mccarthy's road
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: This "World" Isn't too far away, so get on board!
Summary: 5 Stars
I liked the book. Its quite easy to read and I think it could be useful as a tool for people who still believe that there is plenty of oil - forever and forever - and they all lived happily ever after -
with plenty of oil and humongous SUV's and Recreational Vehicles getting 3 miles per gallon.
I live a few miles from Washington County New York and really enjoyed the author's depiction of the countryside and landscape of this beautiful part of New York State.
SOMEWHAT UNREALISTIC? IS THIS REALLY DOABLE?
One critique: Robert Earle, newly elected as Mayor of the small burgh of Union Grove has as his first task as Mayor the repair of a crumbling piece of infrastructure - the town's water delivery system. Wow what a Mayor! He goes out of town to Albany for a week and by the time he gets back the project is nearly complete and he drops by to put the capstone on the project. ALL THIS WITHOUT MACHINES! Just human and animal labor! I found this a bit unrealistic.
FANTASYLAND:
Robert Earle heroically saves a woman and her daughter from a house fire.
The hero, Robert Earle, has all kinds of women throwing themselves at him but no other man in this story seems remotely sexual. Poor Robert Earle! He has to sexually satisfy so many ladies!
WOMEN! WOMEN! SEX!
There are other highly skilled men in the story, Wayne Karp, the villain - the dentist, the doctor, but, no women are sexually available to them! Go figure! Bullock who has a virtual paradise and is married, yet, no other woman is attracted to him??? Why? go figure........ Bullock is the only guy around who still has real hamburgers and hot dogs and electricity but no women are interested in him??? <scratching my head>
I really was intrigued by the part of the story that depicted the trip to Albany to find Bullock's boat on the Hudson River and recover his crew. The suicide of an old man in a remnant Ford Explorer seemed to be thrown into the plot as window dressing, didn't really contribute to the story that much. These guys are real heroes, they can dig graves along the way and still make incredible time on foot. Go figure!
THE WORLD "BY HAND"
If you are willing to suspend reality a little, this is highly entertaining. Some of this BY HAND world already does exist here in nearby Vermont and adjacent Washington County New York. This "BY HAND" world is not that far away, literally or figuratively.
Book Review: A worthwhile but not quite fully imagined accompaniment to The Long Emergency
Summary: 3 Stars
This book has given me a lot of thoughts--there is a lot to recommend it. One of the other reviewers mentioned that it was nice to see someone write a story like this that was set somewhere other than the West Coast and didn't descend into native American/new age spirituality. Personally, I would love for there to be a Northeast version of "The Fifth Sacred Thing" or the "Dies the Fire" trilogy of S.M. Stirling, but the point is still taken. On those terms, this is a mostly credible read.
I did have a problem with the Albany section, personally. Since I live here, I was looking forward to seeing what JHK's take would be, and ... well... Albany without black people? Qu'est-ce que like c'est, dude? What, was there a race war and they all die? The omission seems outrageous to me, partly because I think that if there were a race war in Albany, it'd be the white-power thugs that would bite it. I get what the larger point is, but still. Puh-leez, Jim-wards.
I did like the mystical element that came up at the end. Being a pagan who works with the Jesus myth (a la Freke and Gandy, q.v.) I didn't really mind the Xtian aspect of Brother Jobe and his group. In a way, the settlers are post-Christian, at least in the "send me money so I can help to legislate your hate" sort of Xtianity that would seek to X people out for the AK-47 Jesus or Pope Prada whichever the case may be.
The book got me to thinking though, as a gay storyteller and actor and director and witch myself, how I might like to thread together possible narratives and entertainments for the coming strange-oid times we're going to be experiencing. I've been interested in JHK's non-fiction work since I got a copy of the galleys for "The Geography of Nowhere" back in the mid-90s, and typed up the index for it. As for several other readers, I was alive to the nature aspects of the story, as well as the slow awakening of these Union Grove-ites to the necessity of fashioning together a real community. I CRAVE such a thing, and so I applaud this attempt at putting something together, even though on more than a few levels it leaves me out of it.
Ah, well. Can't have everything, but maybe I can create my own "Big Eden" post-collapse. (Q.V. the Thomas Bezucha film--it's a MUST for peak-oil/global warming people. It creates an idyllic vision of country life, but it's one a lot of people would like to imagine themselves in.)
Blessings!