[RdSnt]

It's actually far to utopian, it skips over the initial chaos of the collapse. Which means the context is distorted to reflect a fantasy outcome. As Kunstler has said though, it is a fictional novel.

[Schadenfreude]

I'm on chapter 2 and this is one real downer. Very hard core.

No it's not. It's really quite mild.

I just finished the book. I thought it was poorly written literature compared to Cormac McCarthy's, "The Road". Now there is good writing.

There's nothing distinctive about Kunstler's story. It doesn't instruct or enlighten. The plot is mediocre and the quality of writing is merely passable."A World Made By Hand" is like an old small town Western, with all the usual human foibles and the usual battle between good vs evil - except that it has also has post-oil material thrown in as background.

It probably wouldn't be difficult to find a better written Western, or a better written tale of small town life in the 19th century.

It's obvious that Kunstler is wishing for the demise of civilization. He appears to hold in contempt those who would yearn for a world made by brains. He obviously has contempt for those who would believe that human beings can perfect their world through their intelligence.

It's as if he is saying, "Don't try to think, it only gets you in trouble".
Well, if that's the story of the human race, its pointless to tell any stories at all, isn't it?

[syrac818]

Kunstler is garbage.

The fact that the dude is taken even semi-seriously by people on this board is what's the real downer. He's made a pretty solid amount of cash off his own brand of doomerism, and it's always the same thing -

I'm not that talented of a writer, but I can take pessimism and whining to a whole new level.

Fuck him. And fuck Savinar too. Both of them have been owned on their projections of life with $100+ oil.

[TheDude]

Where'd the original reviews Topic on WMBH go?

[Hagakure_Leofman]

Kunstler is garbage.

Thanks for that! I'm off to order my copy now. After what you've written 'syrac818', and how you've put it, I'm sure this book will be worth buying.

Poor ol' Kunstler. People can't help shooting the messenger. Some people always need a little ice-cream with their bad news. I say there is nothing wrong with a good strong espresso, so if you're reading Mr K, keep up the good work.

[johhnytrash]

I liked it. I didn't think the plot was very deep. But it was entertaining. I liked how there were aspects to the post-oil world that I didn't consider, like how some 'burgs will do better then others and people going insane. I'm not looking forward to everyone talking about Jesus all the time, but Mr. K made it seem like peak oil would be tolerable... if you survive the die-off.

[Schadenfreude]

Kunstler is garbage.

Thanks for that! I'm off to order my copy now. After what you've written 'syrac818', and how you've put it, I'm sure this book will be worth buying.

Poor ol' Kunstler. People can't help shooting the messenger. Some people always need a little ice-cream with their bad news. I say there is nothing wrong with a good strong espresso, so if you're reading Mr K, keep up the good work.

It's not that anyone needs "ice cream" with bad news, it's that Kunstler created a merely mediocre story. Writing/Story-Telling is an art form. Some people are really talented at it. But Kunstler is not.

If you yourself, dim the lights, lay down and shut your eyes and try to conjure up the first vision of what post-peak 15-20 years will look like (given the unlikely absence of any adaptation or innovation), then you could pretty much think up the basic picture created in "A World Made By Hand" all on your own without working very hard.

The gift of a talented writer is to immerse the reader credibly into an original and unexpected story line; teaching, enlightening, exposing, provoking thought, creating wonder, challenging preconceptions, asking important questions both tangible and moral, etc.

Kunstler just half-asses his way through his predictable novel without achieving any of those more noble writing goals. His narrow focus of the small town activities of a small group of people merely serves to screen out the larger world (conveniently for Kunstler) because to include the larger world would have required a larger, more comprehensive story with a larger total vision and larger, more complex set of events. A larger vision is something that Kunstler did not demonstrate in this novel.

When you compare Kunstler's mediocre attempt with some of Steinbeck's works, the comparison is simply laughable. I get the impression that Kunstler just needs to keep irons in the fire within the milieu of the sustainability movement, the new urbanism movement, the peak oil movement, etc. So he wrote a not-too-difficult or involved novel in order to keep his name out there in front of people.

[DomusAlbion]

On the level of great literature as Schadenfreude has spoken to, Kunstler's work is not great. It is, however, an easy, relaxing read about a possible post peak oil future. Not doomer porn, not too exciting yet it does discuss a small piece of the problem and gets the ideas out into the public market.

Who knows; some people might opt out of the big city rat race because they read the book.

[TheDude]

His narrow focus of the small town activities of a small group of people merely serves to screen out the larger world (conveniently for Kunstler) because to include the larger world would have required a larger, more comprehensive story with a larger total vision and larger, more complex set of events. A larger vision is something that Kunstler did not demonstrate in this novel.

"Vision" isn't dictated by the size of the milieu, c.f. Thoreau. Wasn't knocked out by Kunstler's fiction but he's serviceable enough. Yes, he's no Steinbeck. Neither was Chandler, your point?

How about mashing the two WMBH threads together, Domus?

[alecifel]

I'm not overly fond of JHK, given his snooty anti-southern bent and tendency towards gross bigotry. He's also a doomer of the first class, a linear-thinking wilderness crank casting projections based on second hand knowledge. I don't know how working for "Rolling Stone" qualifies one to sell so many books on energy and architecture. The man has no interdisciplinary studies skills (neither do many economists, geologists, or cornucopians for that matter). And sitting still long enough for an interview for "End of Suburbia" really isn't enough to qualify one as an "expert".

But the novel was entertaining. Poorly written but so are a lot of other books. I think it's worth reading. And Jim's opinions are worth the same as anyone else's, even though they're often insulting. Can't fault a Yankee - they don't know any better! The important thing is he is out there drawing attention to this issue, which is one thing doomers are good for. They get attention. Then people research this a little more and get a better understanding. 6 billion people aren't going to die tomorrow and we're not going back to horses and carts (couldn't feed them if we tried). But maybe somewhere along the line they'll trade their McMansion for an Earthship, buy from the farmer's market and ride a bike to work.

At first I was annoyed with the tangents that didn't get followed up on. Then I realized the book is written first person, non-omiscient. He's telling a story from one person's point of view. So naturally, there are things that just go out of sight. And I think the blank you draw throughout the book is there on purpose. It's meant to invoke a sense of confusion and loss that is appropriate for the setting.

So one (and maybe a half) thumb up. Every Yankee has his day!

NJA

[Lumpy]

I am a doomer. This is not the be-all, end-all book about peak oil.
But it was a good read, with a sense of hope ... which I share, in spite of my belief that things are coming faster than most people (even most people on this board) expect.

Lumpy

[Hagakure_Leofman]

Who would have thought there were some many 'intellectual' literary critics on peakoil dot com

Next thing we'll be discussing Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" essay or perhaps Jacques Derrida and we'll be deconstructing Kunstler for our intellection sense of smug superiority. Gimme a break.

Horses for courses.

What do you want? A novel about peak oil written by shakespeare!

Jesus Christ.

[Graeme]

It is a vision of the world after peak oil that I also object to.

A dark shade of green

James Howard Kunstler, author of the cranky anti-sprawl manifesto Geography of Nowhere and the alarmist peak-oil diatribe The Long Emergency, is, as Paul Greenberg pointed out in an April article in The New York Times Book Review, an environmentalist obsessed with a secular Armageddon. His latest book, published in February, is World Made by Hand. The novel describes one glorious summer in the life of a man in a small, upstate New York town after oil shortages, climate change and nuclear war have destroyed the world. Like Alan Weisman's The World Without Us --Weisman imagined how nonhuman nature might retake the globe after a total extinction of Homo sapiens -- Kunstler shows a fascination with environmental destruction that verges on wishful thinking. Why can't the world just collapse already? Then "we" --or, at least, those of us with taste, discretion and true environmental feeling -- could get on with the business of remaking it … without all those pesky extra people around.

nationalpost

[PrairieMule]

On the level of great literature as Schadenfreude has spoken to, Kunstler's work is not great. It is, however, an easy, relaxing read about a possible post peak oil future. Not doomer porn, not too exciting yet it does discuss a small piece of the problem and gets the ideas out into the public market.

Who knows; some people might opt out of the big city rat race because they read the book.

If I recall right Red Dawn recieved no Oscars, yet it's firmly engrained in the cannon of Doom.

Although World made by Hand comes nowhere near a hard SF like Arthur Clarke, I did think it brought up some interesting perspectives.

[PrairieMule]

nationalpost

Kunstler's post-apocalyptic women have given up trying to be involved in government for their true roles as cooks and sex partners.

[ReducedToZero]

Im currently about half done with the fairly easy "science fiction" World Made By Hand by James Kunstler, a story about the Post Peak World from a fiction perspective. Im opening this thread to discuss the book with anyone who has read it. Please reply and tell me what you thought about the book.

[satjeet]

I just finished this novel. A couple of friends read it and I borrowed a copy. Don't think I would advise someone to actually buy it - especially in hardback. Kunstler is at his best when he's just flat out ranting and he's not a "great" novelist. And others fault his scenario of a near term collapse accelerated by nuclear strikes on LA and DC. Others have trashed him for making his first-person hero improbably successful with the town and with the women.

But all that put to one side, I found it a good "read", a pot boiler. He's written nine other novels and I would say he's at the journeyman level of novel writing - where he's probably going to stay. He also paints (watercolors?) and it shows in this novel. I enjoyed the nature painting.

He makes the hero a fiddler - does Kunstler play an instrument as well as everything else? I don't know. I did start to wonder just how much this was all about him or does he see the narrator as a fictional creation. One question I had that was unanswered in the book - is the hero/narrator bald?

[zeke]

But is it a doomer porn?

No.


I do see it annoying lots of people who don't care for Kunstler's style of meeting bareknuckle reality head-on. He doesn't pour chocolate syrup all over and load it up with sprinkly bits and shove a Hershey bar into it.

In his book World Made By Hand, he does a most excellent job of exploring a scenario of a couple of communities and a region (his own) as they live in and deal with life after the Oil Age.

I found it to be more than a worthy read, I think that it will come to be seen as prescient, assuming there are people in the future who have time to read books, or who have books, or who can even read at all.

The great things about the book are that Kunstler did a beautiful job of creating characters you can care about, or even see as yourself or those you know. He also did a beautiful job of showing how these people contend in the future without oil, yet with remnants of the tools and technology made possible by oil, while they're still smarting from their own recent memories of "how it was." He sets up scenarios which are very easy to envision, partly because he nails human nature, and partly because the components for those scenarios to actually happen are already largely in place right now, just waiting for that little extra shove.

Where I feel the book is somewhat weak, is that Kunstler was a bit heavy-handed, or "checklist-ish," if you will about hitting all of the aspects of peak oil which he trumpets in his other work. Things like, no more "easy motoring" and "suburbs" and "houses not worth living in" etc.

At times, it felt as though he'd taken bullet points from The Long Emergency, and then wove that into a novel.

Not that it isn't a worthy thing to do that, but I just think it could have been handled in such a way that you're less aware that, "ok, this guy's hitting all the points about peak oil."

Kunstler is no doubt a capable writer with a vocabulary and way of describing things clearly on-par with anyone who's ever wielded a pen or keyboard. I guess I would have preferred a bit more polish to the story...a bit more "seduction" and less hitting me over the head with the Peak Oil checklist.

that's my 2 cents...or maybe more like 4 cents.

zeke

[ReducedToZero]

Where I feel the book is somewhat weak, is that Kunstler was a bit heavy-handed, or "checklist-ish," if you will about hitting all of the aspects of peak oil which he trumpets in his other work. Things like, no more "easy motoring" and "suburbs" and "houses not worth living in" etc.

At times, it felt as though he'd taken bullet points from The Long Emergency, and then wove that into a novel.

zeke

I think many people who are familiar with Kunstler would agree that he is notorious for reiterating his same catch phrases (some of which you mentioned) over and over.