Book Review: World Made By Hand
Oct 17th, 2008 by jeremy
World Made By Hand is book forty-two in 52 weeks.
In James Howard Kunstler’s book, the United States has collapsed around 2015. Major oil producing nations have run out of oil to send to the United States, and various epidemics and fighting has set most areas of the country back a hundred years. There are no more cars, and most people don’t leave the town they live in.
The story follows Robert Earle, a former software executive turned carpenter, who has lost his family to the Mexican flu years earlier. After a murder, followed by a crisis nearby, the town is struggling to rebuild infrastructure and Earle is elected mayor.
The book isn’t bleak like The Road, but gives another scary view of what the United States would look like after much of society had collapsed. People don’t have electricity, lawns have been turned into gardens, and people die from small infections. A local Bartertown-like area is in constant struggle with the town, and eventually the two groups fight.
The characters are interesting, and while the story has some good twists and turns, the main point seems to be to show what the world is like after the collapse. Everywhere the characters go and the people they interact with is usually accompanied with a description of how the world had changed for that area of the world or that person’s life. The author has also written a couple of non-fiction books about the same subject, and I think he was trying to get some of those points across while giving the reader a story. Luckily its never boring. Somehow he makes this post-collapse world almost romantic (as long as you know a useful trade or are good at robbing people). There are more than one paragraph devoted to how much the characters appreciate the world now, working for twelve hours a day instead of watching television at night.
A-
My other reviews in 52 weeks
Other people doing 52 books in 52 weeks
- Jaime reviews Spook by Mary Roach
- Nick reviews The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin