Atlantic Monthly Press
Price: $24.00
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JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER reads from World Made by Hand
Harvard Book Store is pleased to host novelist and social commentator JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER as he reads from his new novel World Made by Hand. In his nonfiction The Long Emergency, celebrated social commentator 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. Offering a shocking vision for the coming trauma of our post-oil future, The Long Emergency was a tremendous success and a bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies.
In World Made by Hand, a work of speculative fiction, Kunstler makes a leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like following the long emergency. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. After the catastrophes converged—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—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.
As the heat of summer intensifies, our narrator, Robert Earle, former marketing executive turned carpenter, and his fellow residents of Union Grove struggle with the new way of life. Their challenges play out in a fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish.
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James Howard Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of numerous books, both nonfiction ( including The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and The Long Emergency, and fiction (including Maggie Darling, The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches, and World Made by Hand). He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.
Photo Credit: Charlie Samuels
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