Book Review: World Made By Hand

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler was part of my last Amazon book order. For whatever reason I picked it up to read first. It was a very easy and pleasant read and I finished it in part of one afternoon and a little bit of the next. 

The basic plot is that by a combination of peak oil, resource wars, economic difficulties thereon and terrorist attacks our fossil fuel based just in time delivery system world falls apart. Without getting too into details I would say it falls somewhere between a slow slide type scenario and an immediate One Second After kind of situation. The book takes place some years after this event has happened and the population of the region is significantly diminished. It follows a small town through a summer full of interesting events through the eyes of an older but healthy and lively widower who makes his living doing carpentry. A variety of events happen and they lead to other developments and stuff happens. Now onto our standard format.

The Good: I enjoyed this book more than I have enjoyed any book in a long time. It is really a great read. I appreciated that it talked more about how peoples lives developed, the economy changed and how folks got through everyday events than anything else. I found that particularly noteworthy and thought provoking.

The book went into significant detail about how people did the little things and got along with each other and such. I mean there was some action but the ratio was probably a lot more realistic than most books in the genre which are almost just action/ adventure and gun porn. Instead of writing one paragraph about how the main characters grow a garden, cook and preserve food, etc and then devote whole chapters to very lengthy and detailed discussions of the exact rifle with such and such modifications this book talked about how people got everyday tasks done without electricity or fossil fuels.

One thought provoking thing I appreciated in this book was that it was realistic in that people interacted and worked together. There was still a fair amount of division of labor. Of course everybody had a big garden and usually some chickens and rabbits it was realistic in the sense that they still needed to do something to get a surplus of money/ trade goods to swap for stuff they can't produce.

In a world made by hand the need for semi skilled physical labor will be significant, if just to meet local food production needs. The days of a 70 year old man and his 50 year old son working a huge piece of land with tractors and combines to grow one or two crops would be over. The amount of labor a farm needed would go up exponentially. Seeing as people will (even with a garden and some chickens) need to get some surplus to trade lots of folks would likely end up in this capacity. To compare people who ended up in this role to serfs or peasants would likely be more accurate than not. Just like any other economic system (life isn't so good for somebody who works at McDonalds)  it is better to be close to the top or at least not at the bottom. This got me thinking about skills and how one could position them self to be as comfortable as possible. In the short term stocking food and goods would help but in the long run it would be about wits, skills and productive land.

I could go on for a long time about the great parts of this book. Seriously it was a great book.

The Bad: It probably leaned a bit to peace nick/ everybody just gets along to be realistic. The town didn't have any sort of security plan (like say an informal checkpoint or a night watch) and aside from a couple people getting beat up everything went just fine for a long time after it was clear law and order had collapsed. I halfway just put this here because there should be a "bad" for this review format to work. It was sort of refreshing after reading book after book that are like a mix of a war book with occasional references to storing food and gushes of gun porn about the authors favorite guns/ gun accessories.

Edited to include: I also found it curious that in the book though our federal government (as well as state and pretty much county) had collapsed people still used dollars as currency. Especially in a slow slide type scenario I don't think dollars would go away quickly. Somewhere around when the power goes out and people realize things have changed for the long term I doubt the dollar would be good for much except keeping track of friendly games of poker and monopoly. In the book barter was the most common followed by silver and they mentioned that gold was pretty much hoarded. I just found it curious that in the book people still accepted dollars albeit at a highly inflated rate. I just can't see it working out that way.

The Ugly: It was clearly written from a New England small town perspective. The book was at best halfway condescending of Christianity/ religious people and really anybody who isn't from New England. A good friend of mine found it quite condescending to Southerners. He also noted that while the town folks mocked these people they relied on them for protection. I can't say I entirely saw what he saw but them again I am not a Southerner. Anyway if it bothered him it might bother some other people too.

I really enjoyed this book and think you would too.