Joined: Jan 02, 2008 Posts: 403 Location: out dispatching ronan...
Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 6:47 am Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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.
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:19 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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.
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:45 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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.
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. _________________ Documentary: "Oil, Smoke & Mirrors" Engineers Question 911
Joined: Dec 08, 2004 Posts: 1542 Location: Nez Perce Nation
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:55 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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. _________________ "Modern Agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
-- Albert Bartlett
"It will be a dark time. But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
-- James Lovelock
Joined: Apr 06, 2006 Posts: 2959 Location: 3 miles NW of Champoeg, Republic of Cascadia
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 6:38 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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.
"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? _________________ Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
I'm just gonna find a cash machine.
Joined: Feb 02, 2006 Posts: 170 Location: Luther, OK
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 7:24 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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 _________________ Nick J. Allen
Hilton, Oklahoma
"The Chinese have many hells. This one is the hell of valueless currency." -- J. Albertson
Joined: Nov 16, 2007 Posts: 277 Location: Rural Western Idaho
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 7:33 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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 _________________ Dean Karnazes : "Run when you can, walk when you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up." --- Jackie Joyner-Kersee: "It is better to look forward & prepare, than to look back & regret."
Joined: Jan 02, 2008 Posts: 403 Location: out dispatching ronan...
Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:15 am Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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!
Joined: Mar 04, 2005 Posts: 2576 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 1:00 am Post subject: Re: Review of Kunstler's World Made by Hand
It is a vision of the world after peak oil that I also object to.
A dark shade of green
Quote:
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 _________________ Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
Joined: Sep 02, 2005 Posts: 2876 Location: In a Nigerian compound surrounded by mighty dignataries
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject: Re: Kunstler's World Made By Hand
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.
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. _________________ In other words, it's a huge sh*t sandwich, and we're all gonna have to take a bite.-from Full Metal Jacket
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:21 pm Post subject: Re: World made by hand
ohanian wrote:
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.
Joined: Jun 29, 2008 Posts: 82 Location: San Luis Obispo, CA / San Jose, CA
Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:01 am Post subject: Re: World made by hand
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
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.
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Neither was Chandler, your point?
