I have an ARC copy but I'm assuming it is fairly close to the published version. It was a pretty good book. Interesting. I didn't think much of some of his premises for the end of our civilization, but it worked well enough for the situation he painted. The situation was very plausible & scary. The veneer of civilization is quite thin & delicate. He certainly made that point well.There is quite a bit of description about how fast & far we fell. I found most of it very realistic from the people to the buildings. The way he described the various states of mind & group dynamics was quite well done.I took away one star for the fantastic elements he introduced. I don't like spoilers, but anyone who has read the book will know what they are. They came along late in the book & were distracting from the basic story line - jarring. They did nothing to help the story & should have been left out. (If anyone else read the published copy & doesn't know what they are, I'd be pleased to discuss in email & very happy to change this review.)I'm looking forward to reading the 'Long Emergency' by him. Possibly I should have read it first. ( )

I'm a fan of his earlier nonfiction, The Road to Nowhere and the Geography thereof. This, however, is just a novel to prove his point. I only made it through the first two chapters so perhaps it gets better. ( )

Funny... I was thinking that this book is like Little House on the Prairie, then I read some other reviews and saw that I wasn't the only one who thought that. Of course, it is nothing like The Road (which is a terribly good book).

I know nothing about Kunstler but I am willing to bet that he is an environmentalist. You'll be reading along about the success of a fishing trip and voila! there is a 3 paragraph "description" of how bad the technological/gas-guzzling/capitalist world was.

For me the problem isn't really these eco-political inserts, however, the problem is the description of the fishing trip - Little House anyone? Not what I expected, and certainly not what I enjoy reading.

There are a lot of "factual" points and current events (flu epidemic, for example) that ring very true, and very scary... but... unfortunately, the story itself is too mundane. Technically, the story in The Road was also mundane, but in that story, the writing and atmosphere was so strong that you didn't really notice that nothing was happening... World Made by Hand doesn't have that going for it.

In fact, some of the previous reviews are good enough that you can save yourself hours of reading simply by reading the reviews and skipping the book - they are equally fulfilling. ( )

I very much enjoyed this book, which carries on from Kunstler's non-fiction book The Long Emergency. It does a remarkably good job of engaging you in the life of a small town after the PEAK OIL APOCALYPSE (which I will, from now on, refer to in all-caps), without taking any of the easy potshots.Ends on an interesting magical note, not sure how I feel about that.Anyway, good book. ( )

I very much enjoyed this book, which carries on from Kunstler's non-fiction book The Long Emergency. It does a remarkably good job of engaging you in the life of a small town after the PEAK OIL APOCALYPSE (which I will, from now on, refer to in all-caps), without taking any of the easy potshots.Ends on an interesting magical note, not sure how I feel about that.Anyway, good book. ( )