Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-31% $16.51$16.51
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Prime Goods Outlet
$11.52$11.52
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Jenson Books Inc
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
World Made by Hand: A Novel Hardcover – February 11, 2008
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
- Publication dateFebruary 11, 2008
- Dimensions5.75 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100871139782
- ISBN-13978-0871139788
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition (February 11, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0871139782
- ISBN-13 : 978-0871139788
- Item Weight : 1.09 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,092,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #49,681 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #56,433 in American Literature (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
James Howard Kunstler is probably best known as the author of "The Long Emergency" (The Atlantic Monthly Press 2005), and "The Geography of Nowhere" (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Two other non-fiction titles in that series are "Home From Nowhere" (Simon and Schuster, 1996), and "The City in Mind" (Simon and Schuster, 2002). He's also the author of many novels, including his tale of the post-oil American future, "World Made By Hand" (The Atlantic Monthly press, 2008) and its three sequels. His shorter work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and many other periodicals.
James Howard Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He attended New York's High School of Music and art and SUNY Brockport (BA, Theater, 1971). He was a reporter for the Boston Phoenix, the Albany Knickerbocker News, and later an editor with Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975 he dropped out of corporate journalism to write books, and settled in Saratoga Springs, New York. He now lives in nearby Washington County, N.Y., the setting of his "World Made By Hand" series.
Kunstler's popular blog, Clusterf**k Nation, is published every Monday morning at www.kunstler.com and his podcast, The KunstlerCast, is refreshed once per month.
Kunstler is also a serious professional painter. His work may be seen at www.kunstler.com
Find JHK on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
In the near future (by around 2015, it would seem) both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence of this, oil no longer flows to the USA, and therefore fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, petroleum-fueled vehicles, and, generally, modern life, are all swiftly defunct. The power grid comes on only a half-hour a day; the only radio transmissions are the rantings of preachers. The Internet has become a fairy tale.
The story focuses on a small upstate New York town that has the good fortune to have its water supply gravity-fed, and to be populated by a number of residents skilled in the essentials of nineteenth-century living: a doctor, a dentist, a minister, a carpenter, etc. Despite the great changes in the world, they live on. Their population has been decimated though, from flu and encephilitus.
The novel explores the kinds of groups that populate this new world. There are roughly six factions: First there are the townspeople: the remnants of a middle class and "normal" life: the novel is narrated by Robert Earle, who was once a manager at a Boston-based high tech firm. Robert has lost his family to illness. Then there is a Mr. Bullock, who is a de facto plantation master, whose peasants work for him in exchange for stability and a top-down collective economy; Bullock has accomplished some remarkable things, such as getting a small hydro generator going. Another group is the hive-like New Faith Brotherhood, led by Brother Jobe -- they've arrived recently from Pennsylvania, which they have fled due to race-based fighting among the refuges from D.C. and Baltimore. Wayne Karp is the top dog in Karpstown, a loose-knit cabal of scavengers who live near the town dump, which they excavate for spare parts from the past. Further afield in Albany is Mr. Curry, who runs the docks. Finally, there are those who live outside these groups in isolation.
What Kunstler does is spin these characters and groups into a ripping yarn that wouldn't be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel by Twain or Dickens. There are a couple of levels to this: At the level of individual characters, the novel is a bit of a soap opera, with hair-raising escapes, romance, sentimentality, tears and even some laughs. All this will keep you turning the page. There's also some solid scene-painting of the post-oil remnants:
The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. (p. 166)
On another level, though, he's posing a great sociological question: Can civilization survive after this disaster? What combinations of these groups might balance one another into a kind of stability? It's a little hard to know how serious Kunstler is in this orchestration, because the last few chapters of the novel veer into some weird territory. But I don't want to give away the ending. For exploring social organization through fiction, he's right up there with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and I'm a sucker for this kind of speculative fiction that works its way through problems via believable characters.
Some readers are going to wonder how the world could go to pieces so quickly after the destruction of two cities. After all, the United States has recently suffered the partial destruction of New Orleans, an important port city. But Kunstler knows whereof he speaks: He's the author of an important book The Long Emergency which is about the consequences of "peak oil" that moment when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached, and it becomes increasingly hard to get it out of the ground and run society. If even 1/10 of what Kunstler reports in The Long Emergency comes to pass, then the story of World Made by Hand won't be fiction, it will be fact.
Kunstler was born in the late 40s, so he came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that amused me . . . somewhat . . . is that once the power goes off, people revert to a stereotype of . . . hippies! There's a lot of pot-smoking, long hair, and mate-swapping; taste in music tends towards folk. A brief mention is made of "Smells like Teen Spirit," but the characters in the novel make fun of it. I wondered at times if Kunstler was having a bit of satire with his melodrama.
But this is just quibbling. It's a good book, and if you believe "it can't happen here," then go read The Long Emergency as a followup.
At points this can become unintentionally comic, as when various characters seem to spontaneously and without explanation adopt 19th century phrases and music selections, because apparently there's no more electricity and no cars.
But (aside from just reading an engaging, well-written story) what I liked best was his expression, through the much-depopulated and forcibly agrarian scenario, of a society with a much fuller understanding of the land, animals and natural environment generally than ours. And as a native of the area he describes, his obvious love of Eastern Upstate NY shines through, and is a pleasure to read.
Overall, a well done (and I think accurate) thought experiment of getting inside the heads of people who depend on their gardens, their neighbors, the seasonal crops , not having things rot in storage etc --which is of course the vast majority of human experience until about 75 years ago.
So, strongly recommend. I only deduct one star for some predictable plot lines (but I grade hard)
I highly recommend this book. I hope it makes you think beyond its cover as a good book should (ITS CALLED IMAGINATION! why would a prosperous 19th century mill town be decrepit when tossed back into the 19th century, what has changed???). I finished reading this book several months ago, and its still making me think! I am very excited to learn that he has written a sequel and I can't wait to dive into it (The Witch of Hebron). ENJOY!!!
Top reviews from other countries
The end of oil and the fight for the dregs creates chaos, devastates cities, brings down corporate and government structures until we are thrown back to times without "normal" mobility, communications, electricity, governance or law. Situated in upstate NY, the novel is necessarily very restricted in its geographical scope, befitting a world restricted to foot, horse and cargo-boat travel, a world without telephone, internet or newspapers.
The themes in this relaxed-pace novel are familiar themes of human hopes, fears, anguish, love, loyalty, and redemption, set in trying times that act as a crucible, intensifying action and reaction and compressing the time-frame within which a motley collection of local and wandering survivors must go from wretched isolation, poverty, plague, and lawlessness to a collective survival mode resulting in a model rural village-with lots of Yankee ingenuity bolstered by a Dixie-Rebel sensibility.
The pace of the story mirrors the pace of the new-old world the characters find themselves in. Without TV, malls, instant-texting, automobiles, planes or trains, the hustle & bustle of our modern world is gone.
Story development is deliberate, almost predictable, especially if one has previously read the non-fiction predecessor upon which WMBH is based. However this is not a criticism, as again, the effect mirrors the envisioned return to a sort of normalcy where seasons and their changes regulate the affairs of mankind in a fairly predictable way.
WMBH is a satisfying read for those fascinated by human character, the trials and joys of life, and the questions of how we got to the present, what it has done to us, where we may have to go from here and what that might look like.
The Sequel, The Witch of Hebron, is a great treat if one enjoyed World Made By Hand.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2016