It was often hard to ignore the fact that the author has an agenda.

As one character states after listening to a rendition of the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world could just forget some of those really awful songs?”

It was very obvious that someone does not like rock, or even alternative, music. Our hero, on the other hand, played folk music and spirituals (in fact, I couldn’t help but think of the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? as I read this book…it seemed very appropriate). They were tattooed and played songs by Nirvana and Metallica. The bad guys were the stereotypical biker gang, albeit without bikes.However, there were a few things that bothered me that I just can’t let go of. The book is not as depressing as it sounds, and the reader is left with a feeling of hope at the end. In order to survive, the residents of Union Grove will need to learn to rely on each other and band together to keep their town from falling apart.

Without electricity, their lives are intensely physical. After war, the loss of oil, and disease ravage the United States, the residents of Union Grove have reverted to an agrarian society. 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. 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. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. 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. 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.

The world made by hand