If you have an interest in issues surrounding Peak Oil or the overall tenuous nature of our economic system this work of fiction may be of interest to you. A quick read. ( )

A moving, violent but also elegiac account of a small town, Union Grove, in post-apocalyptic upstate New York. With no electricity, all work must be done by hand.

This doesn't only refer to the labor that people undertake to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves, but also to the work of justice, of remaking a system in which people feel safe. Kunstler's hero examines the temptation to settle matters with extralegal violence instead of the more civilized rules of law, and the results are troubling.

This is a wholly believable world, and the book is the first of a series (followed by The Witch of Hebron in 2010 and A History of the Future in 2014). ( )

Mediocre prepper porn ( )

I gave up on this book without even making it half-way through, which is pretty rare for me. ( )

It's been a while since I've read a post-apocalypse novel. I actually ended up enjoying this quite a bit - with a lot of books like this I feel like I'm just rooting for the protagonists to work it all out and fix the world, but with Union Grove it feels more like wanting people to find a new way to live. The ending is a little bit of a disappointment but overall I really enjoyed this. ( )

The world has run out of oil. There has been illness, and not a lot of people are left. Robert is living in his small world in Union Grove, New York. People don’t get very far from where they live, anymore, without vehicles. There is a settlement closeby with a criminal leader, where most of the townspeople avoid. A religious cult has just moved into the abandoned high school. When Robert heads toward the closeby settlement with a friend to buy some supplies, things go terribly wrong and Robert’s young friend is shot and killed.

Despite starting off with a “bang” (so to speak), I found the book moved really slowly. It was ok. There was a bit of weirdness involving the religious cult toward the end, but the happenings picked up a little bit (with a horrible thing happening!). Overall, it was still an interesting read on people trying to get by on a much older way of life – without electricity and so many other modern conveniences as we are used to. ( )

Very different from what I expected, well written and absorbing. I was most impressed that the religious group introduced at the beginning turned out to be three-dimensional and nuanced, and not the standard bad guys. I thought it wandered a little at the end, but it was good enough that I ordered the next book in the series. ( )

Life in a rural NY village about 9 years after bombs have "taken out" LA & DC followed a few years later by a decimating flu epidemic. The world's economic/trade structure has fallen apart as has (at least in the US) government. There is no mention of a nuclear winter so we'll assume those were some other kind of bomb.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is well written, the story flows smoothly, and I don't have any quibbles about any of the daily life details. Robert is our protagonist: an apparently laid-back carpenter whose family is all gone. It can be read as a tale of people taking care of each other, struggling to keep in place some survival skills. We're told one of the defining characters of humans is we just don't give up.
On the other hand, the bucolic feel is jarred by the arrival of a religious group which contains a number of ex-military men, and a disruption on relations with nearby communities. Robert is shaken out of his depression and starts taking an active role in thinking of how to keep things from falling apart in his community. I regret that the only solution involves killing, as does he, but we are given hope that with a few "bad apples" out of the way a more equitable future will come about. This theme seems to be the importance of strong leaders--good or bad--in setting the direction of any group.
Actually I do have one quibble: the new arrivals talk about leaving the Philadelphia area because of racial strife. At first it's not clear what race they are, but later they talk about the oppressed races rising up. Well, those troubles are distant from rural NY, but at some point these groups will have to develop trust. That's beyond the end of this book.
The story does get wrapped up fairly quickly, & leaves me wondering whether the current state of "normality" will last. ( )

Post-apocalyptic, back-to-the-land sort of book. Romantic in a homesteaddy sort of way. ( )

The first book of 2016 and a good pick it was.

World Made by Hand is a story of post apocalypse small town USA, namely Union Grove, NY. There's no mad max-esque petrol guzzling convoys with endless shoot outs but rather the slow methodical lurch of a small town of folks trying to get by after the modern conveniences vanish.

People will either love its rural realism or hate the lack of break neck action, I for one enjoy a good post apocalypse novel based more in reality than fanciful fiction, the tone brings back memories of Alas, Babylon.

Off to buy book #2, would recommend. ( )

I would rather give this book 3.5 stars. I liked it for the ideas it presented - how we survive if everything we have taken for granted is gone - but I guess I did not like some of the ways that people behave. But who really knows what a "post-apocalyptic" society would be like? What role would religion play? An interesting tidbit from the book - not really a spoiler - one of the most financially lucrative jobs in this society is mining. The mined product is not a metal or gems or even coal, but the mining of 20th century landfills to reuse everything that was thrown away. Interesting! ( )

Post-acocalypse...here and now! What happens could be any time in present or future as the stage is set in real life....Kunstler has given us a picture of the human side of survival, good and bad. The good is becoming human again, knowing and working with neighbors, self sufficient and sharing too, unplugged, making real music and re-building community. The bad is some will just groan, gripe and wait for the shopping center to open again and their electronic device to beep to life. This book and certainly the sequels, are great reads, thought provoking causing some reflection on how we live now...why, what we would do if.. ( )

Meh. I dig post apocalyptica as much as anyone I know, but found this one a bit uninspiring. I like the pastoral themes of the book, sort of like the end of the world as brought to you by john Denver, but was a bit put off by the allusions to Race War a la the Turner Diaries, and found not one reasonable woman character in the book.

All in all, it was an ok read- I just couldn't help feeling that Mr. Kunstler REALLY liked his protagonist and feared lest he be hurt or even more than slightly disturbed by anything in the novel. ( )

World Made By Hand by James Kunstler was such a strange read. I found myself thinking I was reading a five star book at one point, then lowering the rating to a 3 at others. I finally settled on 4 stars as the writing is very good, and the story was intriguing. This is an interesting post-apocalyptic story set over the course of one summer in rural upstate New York. Through a series of disasters, nuclear bombs and epidemics there is not much left of the world as we know it. The remaining population live in small communities and have reverted to raising crops and animals, fishing and earning their living by plying their simple trades. A deceptively calm and peaceful life.

It is soon made clear that this is not a utopia, as this small community must deal with both a religious cult that moves into their town and a gang of thugs that have taken over control of the local land fill and sell their scavenging at highly inflated prices. When one of the local trading boats and crew appears to have gone missing it becomes time to act. Law and order needs to be instilled and eventually the main characters are forced to take on more than they can handle.

Although this is a more appealing version of a post-apocalyptic world than that of say, The Road, I felt the book suffered from the author’s narrow view of gender and race. There are only white people in this story which I found quite off-putting and his archaic view of women-as-chattels was completely unbelievable. And why is it that so many post-apocalyptic stories have the people reverting to a 19th century manner of speaking. All these points pulled me out of the story, lowered my rating and make me believe that ultimately, World Made by Hand is simply another male fantasy driven story. ( )

It was hard for me to put this down. I can't imagine a better story about our likely future as a society. Granted, it may not paint a world as strangely distant and larger than life as [b:A Canticle for Leibowitz|164154|A Canticle for Leibowitz|Walter M. Miller Jr.|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172331601s/164154.jpg|250975], and it is most definitely not all artsy-fartsy-pomo like [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266449195s/6288.jpg|3355573]. That kind of thing is what does it for some, I suppose. Kunstler just tells a real story, and he does that as well as anyone.

This is not the first book of its kind either, but it is most definitely in another class than [b:Earth Abides|93269|Earth Abides|George R. Stewart|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171253295s/93269.jpg|1650913] and [b:Ecotopia|550165|Ecotopia The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston|Ernest Callenbach|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175718707s/550165.jpg|3209155], two earlier failed attempts at post-apocalyptic and desired possible futures, respectively. It falls somewhere in between those extremes and has a comparatively clear range of plausible scenarios to work with, which is why it comes to life so easily. Kunstler is a natural writer who can combine wit with insight in a way I find irresistible, even when I disagree with some of his assumptions. ( )

Great, entertaining story of our world ... In the future, given the way we now live, too complacently. Interwoven into this page turner is a real look at the THINGS we take for granted, as necessary and then life without. A different meaning of living, accepted and good for some, opportunistic for others, the end for those who want the power to come back on. ( )

An intriguing but disturbing read about a time in the near future when a variety of catastrophes -- environmental, diseases, the bombing of major U.S. cities, etc. -- have led to the breakdown of U.S. society. In this society, a man tries to survive, find reasons to live, and bring order to Washington County, NY. I was disurbed by how plausible this scenario seemed. The plot of the book was not as interesting to me as the author's vision of what could happen to our world if we don't take better care of it.
( )

The World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler, published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 2008 is a work of post-apocalyptic fiction, that doesn't quite feel apocalyptic.

In some of the post-apocalyptic fiction I've read, humans become cannibalistic, preying upon others, reverting to an animal-like state. Or perhaps, more appropriately, worse than animal state, considering the ability to reason the choices they make to harm or not to harm others. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, we read about humans at their worst, disabling and hording fellow humans in basements and chopping off pieces of their bodies as needed.

You won't find that kind of grisly reality in World Made by Hand. In fact, it feels more like a romanticized version of pre-industrial America, in which women needed the strong arms of their male counterparts to get anything done. They cooked and cleaned and avoided politics at all costs. No, you won't find women on the city council of Union Grove.

Industrial civilization has come to an end, the government has shut down, bombs have been dropped across the United States and a flu epidemic has wiped out a good portion of the population. But in small pockets throughout the country, communities survive.

The story is told by Robert Earle, the town carpenter. Through the lens of this middle-aged male, who has no shortage of wanton females requesting his company, we read a hero-adventure story, with Earle becoming the town hero (and the mayor).

The story is well-written. Great pacing, with plot points in places they should be; just in time to keep the reader from getting bored. Character dialogue is well-done. But the swaggering clichéd bad guy, ex-biker, the religiosity and male-centric view appears more as a male fantasy made post-apocalyptic.

Like a bunch of guy friends roughing it for the weekend. Given, Robert Earle is made into a sensitive type who dislikes using his firearm and killing a man who was shooting at him, but near the end Kunstler gives into temptation and Earle does a swaggering hero scene in which he threatens to kill the bad guy, but in a sensitive way.

“I'm going to see if the Reverend Holder survives what you did to him.”

“And if he don't, you going to kill me?”

“Pretty much, I'm thinking.”

“And then I s'pose you'd say I was trying to break out or some shit, right?”

“Something like that...”

Throw in a several religious christian hymns, a 'Mother' of a local religious cult who can see the future and the unexplained death of a bad guy with the same markings of death as one of his victims and though the mystery is never followed up, it's something for the population of Union Grove to ponder for years.

I would recommend the book, because it is a good read. An example of good writing, but not for those who don't feel like visiting a male-centric jaunty romp through the fall of civilization. ( )

http://www.andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/08/book-review-world-made-by-hand-by...

My lovely wife brought me the audiobook of World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler, so we could listen to it together on our way to my 10 year high school reunion. And I have to think back that far to remember I book as terrible as World Made by Hand.

I love post-apocalyptic literature, from the deathly serious, like Lord of the Flies, to anything as glib as Slapstick. I think that this kind of science-fiction gives us the chance to see humanity reduced to its roots. In the same way that Hemingway strove to boil things down, to write "one true sentence," the post-apocalyptic world brings the true things into focus.

There are two common mistakes.

The first kind of mistake is what I call the Rabbit Hole Mistake. The author imagines a world so vast, so complex, so different from our own that describing that world takes all of the air out of the book. Tolkien didn't make that mistake in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but if you've ever tried to read any of his notes, The Silmarillion, or the unpublished tales, you quickly understand that you've gone too far down the rabbit hole.

The second mistake (I think, the worse mistake) and the mistake of World Made by Hand is the Tract Mistake. You'd know a tract if you saw one. The Bible thumpers hand them out on street corners. At restaurants where I've worked, the after church brunch crowd would always leave them on the table, often wrapped in (or in lieu of) my tip.

A tract is poorly written, littered with straw men and false corollaries, and exists only to foist the author's belief upon us. A tract novel exists in a limbo, marketed to adults, but written with all the grace and subtlety of a children's chapter book (which is to say, none of the grace or subtlety that makes writing interesting to me).

Kunstler believes that the United States is hurtling towards the end of the world's oil supply. In World Made by Hand, America loses the war for the last oil, and nuclear bombs destroy Los Angeles and Washington DC. Somehow, in his telling, America has the resources for war, the world sees the end coming, but instead of dumping billions of dollars into solar, hydro and wind power, our leaders (and all of us) step happily off the ledge. But don't think too much about how we got here.

Kunstler presents us with a Marty Stu, a protagonist who is such the predictable leader that it's stomach churning. He is so faceless, so without definition, that I can't remember his name without looking it up; ah yes, Robert. A former IT executive who finds he's really a master carpenter once the lights go out, whose logic and love for the community make him its moral pillar (so much so that he's thrust into the role of mayor for no reason other than that there are no "real" men around to take the lead), who finds women throwing themselves on his bed (seriously, when we start the book he's boning the preacher's wife, and by the end he's scooped up the only available hotty in the county despite a 20 year age difference).

Where Kunstler really gets me is in his social assumptions.

On gender roles: there are no women on the town council, and the ladies are fine with that. We've gone back to the old gender roles once there's no more oil, and that's okey-dokie. Also, there's no mention of any homosexuality. Maybe all those gays died off in one of the flu epidemics that washed through.

On race relations: there's racial strife in Philadelphia and New York and all them scary big cities. Thankfully, there are no black folks in Upstate New York. There used to be a family or two, but they all moved away while Robert wasn't paying attention.

On people's ability to help each other: nobody has really thought about banding together because we're all just so, so solipsistic.

I spent the first half of the book trying to figure out what Kunstler's religious angle was. There's a lot of religion in this book, and all of it looks bad: the local preacher is sexually impotent, so he's given his tacit approval to Robert sleeping with his wife, keeping her happy while he keeps up the pretenses of normalcy for the head family of the local church; the book starts when a religious colony moves in, they're militaristic and intimidating at first but their leader comes off like a con-man, so you know (through the protagonist) not to trust them. And then in the second half of the book, shit gets weird- there's a bloated, sweets eating seer, and Brother Job obtains the power of teleportation cause he might be an angel.

While listening to the audiobook, it took us a while to figure out what was so annoying about the conversation. First, there was very little authentic dialogue: everyone speaks in complete sentences, with little to no profanity (except from the villains- oh, and there are villains). Second, every sentence of dialogue ends with "Robert said" or "Brother Job said." Every one. In case, you know, we're not strong enough readers to keep track of two people speaking in turns.

But on the bright side, at least I got to meet Robert, the everyman who's a little too perfect. I like to imagine he's out there now, toiling away to make the world after oil a more livable place, now that he's stepped out of his grief and taken up his rightful place as a leader of (only white, heterosexual, god-fearing) men. ( )

If you have an interest in issues surrounding Peak Oil or the overall tenuous nature of our economic system this work of fiction may be of interest to you. A quick read. ( )

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, in the Hudson River Valley, a group of survivors of political, technological and nuclear disaster, plus disease, are attempting to reshape the life of their town within the parameters of what they once knew.

Out on the fringes of Union Grove are a group of former bikers who run a salvage warehouse and make their own law, and a well-to-do landowner who's established a plantation society, complete with the only steady source of electricity, a "small hydro outfit."

Into this mix marches a religious sect, led by the bigger-than-life Brother Jobe, that takes over the Union Grove high school. By dint of personality and force, the New Faithers make their mark on the town, particularly on Robert Earle, a former computer guy turned carpenter who becomes its new mayor, and his friend Loren Holder, who leads the town's other congregation but whose own faith is wobbly.

James Howard Kunstler, author of such nonfiction works as "The Long Emergency : surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century," writes a good and often suspenseful story and describes well the nature of the world left behind after the collapse of the world that was.

One off-note is the use of locutions that may have sounded normal in 18th-century speech. Another is a diet seemingly based on recipes from a 6th-grade American pioneers curriculum. Finally, the book is built on a supposition common to many works of speculative fiction: Even those who lived a good many years in our present culture seem in middle age to have no memory of how to do modern things, and no one thinks to harness the energy of the sun, the wind, the earth. When they do manage, as the plantation owner has, those outside the special group seem incapable of replicating their success.

This is the sort of book that has a Christ Figure, but I'm not altogether sure which it is supposed to be: the carpenter Robert Earle, or the New Faither named Minor. Devils there are aplenty.

And somewhere nearish the novel's end, we are introduced to a woman who may be the center of the hive mind, or the wellspring of life, or who knows what. The point seems to be that even -- or perhaps especially -- in this world of the future, science doesn't, indeed, can't, have all the answers, that some things have to be taken on faith. Also, that some things have to be left for the sequel, in this case "The Witch of Hebron."

Put me on the list; I care enough for these flawed, good people to find out what happens next. ( )

Are you a locavore? Do you think people who grow their own food are better/happier/healthier/superior? Do you hate big business, major corporations, and all that industrialized nonsense? Does "made in China" make you squirm? This book is for you! A utopian paradise beset by human suffering, mass death, and general apocalyptic despair! Hey, you asked for it, not me.

World Made by Hand is a dystopian novel set years after the United States government collapsed due to oil shortages and general economic failure. With no lights, no radio, no television, and all that, everything falls into disarray. Prolonged exposure to this miserable form of existence has apparently resulted in strong inclination for drug use, lots of sex with people you probably shouldn't (like the minster's wife and that lady who just lost her husband) and lots of alcohol. I mean LOTS alcohol. Like "What will you have with your eggs? Alcohol, alcohol, or alcohol?" We can let the water system go to hell and bathe in water saturated with decaying animal putrescence but heaven forbid there isn't enough alcohol to go around.

It was hard for me to take this book seriously. It really was a relatively well-written novel, very atmospheric and with an addicting plot to boot. There are many positive things I could say about the novel, but it just kept feeling like the author handed the manuscript to a 13-year-old and asked what he thought, and the boy said "more drugs and boobies!" I'm far from a prude, in fact I'm probably on the opposite end of the spectrum, but the absurdity of it detracted from the realism I the author was aiming at. Plus, the weird evangelical cult still has me a little confused.

I liked the book though, really I did. Well, sort of. It was enjoyable and I'll probably read The Witch of Hebron eventually, but I'll be putting it aside from now and come back to it some other time for now. Diehard dystopian fans should definitely look into it though, there are enough interesting ideas here to make to intrigue regulars of the genre, I suspect. For everyone else, well, you could do worse... 3 stars! ( )

Although a big concept book, life after the world runs out of oil, this book transports by focusing on the details of living in a hand made world and makes it sound not entirely unattractive. ( )

Synopsis:
The world has moved on, thanks to climate change, a worldwide oil shortage, and population devastation from superbugs, and in one small corner of New York State, the world is being rebuilt by hand.
Review:
Anyone who spends much time with me will eventually learn that I am obsessed with The Long Emergency, one of World Made By Hand author James Kunstler’s non-fiction treatises. I have always been drawn to the apocalyptic, and now that I am a mother I can worry about the world my daughter will inherit.

World Made By Hand is filled with Kunstlerisms–imagery and expressions that are familiar to anyone who has read his books or spent any time on his blog. He is always at his best when conjuring a decaying post-automobile America, where the suburbs are blighed ghettos and big box stores crumble without power to heat and cool them. The novel is a great introduction to the ideas that obsess Kunstler (and his acolytes, myself included), yet it’s far more hopeful than any of his jeremiads.

The protagonist of World Made By Hand is Robert, who once worked in corporate America, and who now finds himself mayor of an ersatz community in upstate New York. His townspeople just want to get by, but they’re caught between an encroaching band of religious fanatics, and a mini-despot who may have aggressively nefarious intentions towards the town. After a young man is murdered, Robert finds himself at the center of an ancient kind of conflict in a new world that looks like an old one.

I was not expecting World Made By Hand to be as lyrical as it is. If I didn’t know Kunstler’s non-fiction, I’d be taken by the poetry of many of the passages. However, as much as I was tickled to be in on Kunstler’s auto-intertextuality, it distracted me from engaging with the story. That won’t stop me from recommending it–I think it’s more accurate a picture of our future as anything found in the Jetsons! ( )

The setting is a post-apocalyptic upstate New York. The US has been bombed, we’re out of oil, and people are reverting back to a pre-industrial society. This novel deals with creating and maintaining a society, the question of justice, and the problems the first post-industrial generation faces as its forced to downgrade technologically. It’s a really gripping book, but I think it Kunstler focused too much on the doom and gloom- there was a constant undercurrent of “repent, ye sinners” running through the book, directed at the 21st century reader. It’s a good novel disguised as a dire prophecy of what might happen if we don’t break our dependence on oil. ( )