PrairieMule wrote:I'm on chapter 2 and this is one real downer. Very hard core.
syrac818 wrote:Kunstler is garbage.
Hagakure_Leofman wrote:syrac818 wrote: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.
Schadenfreude wrote: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.
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.
DomusAlbion wrote: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.
Graeme wrote:
nationalpost
Kunstler's post-apocalyptic women have given up trying to be involved in government for their true roles as cooks and sex partners.
ohanian wrote:But is it a doomer porn?
zeke wrote:
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
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