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World Made by Hand
| Title | World Made by Hand |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-04-11 23:40:00 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever.
Review
I read Kunstler's The Long Emergency and was affected for months, but after reading World Made by Hand, I realize that Kunstler suffers from a profound lack of imagination for that which isn't immediately in his intellectual/emotional/philosophical grasp. I could hang with the premise of a small community in the very near future trying to remake themselves after converging apocalypses have nearly wiped their population out and cut them off from other towns, but there is no way I buy that the people of this world would revert immediately back to gender roles and speech patterns resembling those of the colonies in 17th century America. Women, who were supposedly fully functioning adults in the pre=apocalypse early 21st century seem to only exist to provide physical comfort for the men, and a bit of canning and cooking. Did the plagues infect their personalities causing them to forget any professional degrees they held? Believe me, if a global tragedy of this magnitude struck tomorrow, I don't know many woman or girls who would hang to not being allowed to be part of the town counsel. They'd be shouting that the men had their chance and very obviously screwed things up, so scoot over so we can work this stuff out together. The one positive benefit I have enjoyed from reading World Made by Hand is that it makes me reevaluate The Long Emergency--I now recognize Kunstler's lack of imagination at play in his inability to invision scenarios of the future that involve discovery, new ideas, new solutions, new technology.
