Review: World Made by Hand

James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand has been around a couple of years now, but I’ve just read it, and frankly, I’m underwhelmed. I previously read his non-fiction work The Long Emergency, and was quite impressed by that, and had high hopes for his novel. Alas, disappointment ensues.

The book takes place after a collapse of society precipitated by the confluence of peak oil, financial collapse and climate change. The resulting society is functioning at an 1800s, largely agrarian level of society, and where it is not, it is scavenging old technology and materials. The viewpoint character is the local carpenter and handyman, formerly in the computer and software business prior to the collapse.

The story is fairly slow to develop, and the pace of the book is almost languid in places. While the prose is well written, I found the plotting to be slow enough that I had to force myself not to skip ahead. The ‘exciting’ parts of the book are barely that, in my opinion, and the novel is unlikely to keep you on the edge of your seat.


The main problem I have with the book is that it almost completely glosses over how the characters in the book evolved the current society, and doesn’t really show anything of the devolution and collapse that preceded it. If you’re looking for a book from which you can draw a lot of lessons in survival, this isn’t it.

As entertainment, it is okay, a decent enough read, as far as it goes. I would recommend borrowing it from your local library rather than laying out hard earned cash.

I just looked at how short the review of this book is, and maybe that’s the telling point: There just isn’t much to say about this book, good or bad. It just misses the mark completely, and falls somewhere in the middle.

Originally posted July 10, 2011 @ MPN

Review: The Long Emergency

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is an interesting book, for serveral reasons. The first is that the author has tried to take a reasoned approach to peak oil and its consequences. Kunstler is on the pessimistic end of the spectrum in his views, but he presents well reasoned arguments to support them. I agree with some of it, some I don't.

The part I do agree with is that increasingly expensive and scarce oil over the next decade or so is going to force a radical shift in how we organize our society. For example, Kunstler examines how much fossil fuel is required to farm in the form of fuel, fertilizer and pesticide, and paints a dim picture of what happens as it oil runs out. He predicts many more of us will be engaged in food production in the future.

He is also highly dubious about the survival of our large cities and their suburbs in their present form, and goes so far as to make some broad predictions about the prospects for different regions of the US as oil becomes scarcer. It's not a pretty picture.

On the whole, the book is well written and informative, although it suffers from being written only a few years after 9/11, and the general paranoia that gripped Americans after the event is very evident. So are Kunstler's biases toward the region he grew up and lives in. However, these are easily seen and allowances can be made for them.

If nothing else, Kunstler's book makes an excellent starting point for you to investigate the possible consequences facing us here in Canada. Give yourself a present and put this in yoiur Christmas stocking.....

Merry Christmas!

Originally posted December 24, 2010 @ MPN

Gray nineties

I’ve recently read James Wesley Rawles book Patriots. Or rather, I’ve read the original shareware version that he once published called ‘Gray Nineties’ and has since tried and failed to erase from the web. From what I can gather from other glowing and not so glowing reviews, the present incarnation of the book has at least two problems that are additional to my version. One of the problems is a wonky time line, in part due to attempts to incorporate 9/11 and Mr. Obama. The other is that recent versions apparently are quite the list of ‘recommendations’ for Mr. Rawles various sponsors and advertisers. So that caveat expressed, let’s press on with the review.

As entertainment, it’s so-so. Rawles is not the greatest writer of the 20th century, but to give him his due, he has said so himself. He’s readable, and reasonably interesting, but the story tends to bog down in technical details, which I’m sure fascinate some people, but tend to harm the narrative. Character descriptions and overall characterization is weak, to the point that I had trouble separating the characters from each other without a bit of thought.

Even so, the first three quarters of the book are fairly enjoyable. He loses me when the story turns into the standard paranoid ‘throw off the chains of oppression; defeat the evil UN overlords’ crap. In my view, it would have been a better book had he stuck with the story of his survivors.

There are a few other issues that bother me as well. Mr. Rawles’ über-survivors never seem to face a crisis for which they haven’t prepared, including evacuating their base and forming a resistance movement, which makes the book a bit of a bore to me. Ho-hum, the survivors triumph again using superior preps, firepower, and tactical planning. I suppose there might be people well enough off to be as prepared and trained as the characters are portrayed, but in many, many years of prepping, I’ve never met any.

There seems to be perfect group unity as well, with nary a whisper of internal dissent or disagreement. It’s all very antlike, even somewhat socialist in nature. At any rate, it is unrealistic, as anyone that has seen any kind of small group dynamic in operation under stress can tell you.

Finally, I’m a little troubled by a couple of incidents portrayed in the book where the characters seem to be stopping, searching and dispensing justice to those traveling past their retreat. Perhaps I’ve misread the location where the incidents take place, but it seems to me it is a public road running past the fictional retreat. It seems a little contrary to Mr. Rawles’ views as espoused on his website and elsewhere, but perfectly in line with setting yourself up as a sort of medieval baron dispensing 'justice'.

This book is often promoted by enthusiastic reviewers as a how-to-prepare manual clothed in a novel. Perhaps it is if you have unlimited time, money and personnel it might serve as such, although as many have said, reading about it and having the training to do something are two entirely different things. It reads more as a creepy little personal fantasy to me.

I think if you’re looking for a book to prepare your mind for a serious societal collapse, you might be better off with the recently published ‘One Second After’ by William R. Fortschen, or ‘Lights Out’ a free e-book on the web by an author calling himself ‘Halffast’* on a similar topic. Neither of the protagonists of these stories is well prepared, and I think there are far more lessons to be learned from their mistakes than from the super prepared characters in Rawles’ novel.

Overall, I’d say that if you can borrow a copy of ‘Patriots’, go ahead and read it. On the other hand, if you’re going to lay out some money, you might be better prepared for a crisis by taking the cash and buying a few cans of tuna fish than by buying the book.

*The free version of this book has since disappeared. The author, like Rawles, has published the work in a version that must be purchased.

Originally posted October 24, 2010 @ MPN