Quotes from book
World Made By Hand

World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler

World Made by Hand is a dystopian novel by American author James Howard Kunstler, published in 2008. Set in the fictional town of Union Grove, New York, the novel follows a cast of characters as they navigate a world stripped of its modern comforts, ravaged by terrorism, epidemics, and the economic upheaval of peak oil, all of which are exacerbated by global warming.Narrated by Robert Earle, a local carpenter who has lost his wife and son, the novel focuses on four separate "cultures" that represent the directions society could go after a breakdown of modern social norms. The citizens of Union Grove are living on the tail end of a national catastrophe, with their community slowly falling apart from neglect and natural decay. Within their community, a separate group of scrappers and thugs led by Wayne Karp run the "General Store" out of the town dump and live in a group of trailers known as Karptown. The third faction is led by Steven Bullock, a wealthy farmer with vision who has set his farm up like an English manor and strives to become self-sufficient. As the story begins Brother Jobe comes to town, the leader of the New Faith Church, a religious group that has fled the south and settle into the old high school. Much of the rest of the nation seems to be falling apart, with nuclear blasts destroying Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cities devolving, and a fractured United States. All of these forces struggle to respect life in a way that was taken for granted before events changed, and build pragmatically for a new future. Earle's experiences are the focus of this struggle.

“Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required?”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 38, p. 181

“I lay wake […] listening to the rain drip from the eaves and thinking of the big map that hung from the top of the chalkboard in my primary school in Wilton, Connecticut, so many years ago, back in the days of cars, television, and air-conditioning. The states on this map were muted tones of pink, green, and yellow. Over it hung the flag that we pledged allegiance to every single morning. "One nation under God, indivisible…"”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 31, p. 150

“We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20

“We were content to be undisturbed in our our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the Empire State, where the Battenkill runs into the Hudson River.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 65, p. 317

“Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 28, p. 137

“In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove's leading industry. When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 5, p. 28

“We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 12, p. 57

“There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 55, p. 262

“Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it, it was so demoralizing.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 36

“The essence of politics was to not act on your impulses.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 42, p. 199

“I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn't come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising had gone with it.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 21

“I'd been carrying [my Ruger.41 Magnum] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 36, p. 171

“I argued that the human race should have known it was in for trouble, at least we in the United States should have, given how insane our way of life had become. Minor quit blowing into his harmonica long enough to say that John D. Rockefeller and the Bush family had made a deal with the Devil going back all the way to the 1900s.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 38, p. 181

“Whatever the other failures of the U. S. government were, it had managed to print an excess of dollars which, combined with the collapse of trade and communication, had severely eroded the currency's value.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 30, p. 146

“It was obvious there would be no return to "normality." The economy wouldn't be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 24

“I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out, until there was nothing.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 4, p. 20–21

“In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly build houses. Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 1, p. 5

“Jesus […] look how we live? I'm practically a serf.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 37

“As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in a effect that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 21, p. 101

“We regarded opium as a godsend. It did not develop into an illicit trade, though. There was no legal prohibition, no police running around trying to suppress drugs, driving up the price artificially, and no marketing system. There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and travel was something you just didn't do anymore. Anybody could grow their own poppies or buy raw opium paste from one of the growers. Farmers made more money growing raspberries or asparagus. They grew poppies as a public service. A few people took to smoking opium, but those with an extremely apathetic attitude toward survival tended not to last long in the new disposition of things.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 5, p. 30

Similar authors

James Howard Kunstler photo

James Howard Kunstler 45

American writer 1948

Frank Herbert photo

Frank Herbert 158

American writer

William Saroyan photo

William Saroyan 190

American writer

Ray Bradbury photo

Ray Bradbury 401

American writer

William Faulkner photo

William Faulkner 214

American writer

Julio Cortázar photo

Julio Cortázar 29

Argentinian writer

David Foster Wallace photo

David Foster Wallace 185

American fiction writer and essayist

Pearl S. Buck photo

Pearl S. Buck 95

American writer

Charles Bukowski photo

Charles Bukowski 555

American writer

Joseph Campbell photo

Joseph Campbell 140

American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Similar authors

James Howard Kunstler photo

James Howard Kunstler 45

American writer 1948

Frank Herbert photo

Frank Herbert 158

American writer

William Saroyan photo

William Saroyan 190

American writer

Ray Bradbury photo

Ray Bradbury 401

American writer

William Faulkner photo

William Faulkner 214

American writer