ABOUT
THE BOOK

In his previous book, celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the age of globalization and mankind’s explosive progress over the last two hundred years was based on the availability of cheap fossil fuels. He observed that the terminal decline of oil production, combined with the perils of climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. A tremendous success, The Long Emergency sold over 100,000 copies and cemented Kunstler’s place as an important voice in the debate on our country’s future. His latest book, the critically acclaimed World Made by Hand, is an astonishing work of speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. After the catastrophes converged—the end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemics—they are doing whatever they can to get by. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. 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. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Americans are increasingly aware of the possibility of the long emergency.