Sunday, 28 April 2013

Live Like Fiction Book ClubWorld Made By Hand

This month I chose the novel, World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler, for the LLF Book Club. It's the story of the not-too-distant future here in rural Washington County, New York. Kunstler imagines a world not without oil, but without leadership or a functioning government. In the book a terrorist group plants bombs on a series of cargo freighters in a west-coast port and the explosion sends a ripple through our economy we could not recover from. The bombs made it impossible to allow any cargo into the country without being inspected and that process took so long that the businesses that traded goods on said ships started to fall apart. It took forever to get t-shirts and tomatoes in the American stores and international business suffered. After that two bombs took out Washington DC and Los Angeles and that was all it took to break the camels back. The nation collapsed from lack of resources and a functioning economy. Services faded away until the electricity was just the occasional flicker and the government entirely shut down (along with all the services it provided, from welfare to road plowing). Unlike a lot of modern apocalyptic fiction, WMBH doesn't involve zombies or UN plots. It was created by the same situations and enemies we have now. The oil didn't run out, it simply got to expense to get to and the money was all used up elsewhere. America fell back to functioning more like it did in the civil war than now. This all happened in a decade of decline.

What I like about this series is the people. This book doesn't focus on world politics, peak oil, or terror plots. This is the story of a town in a farming community and how it survives. Complicated relationships, traditional gender roles, religious fanaticism and plain old fashioned murder and suicide are what creates the landscape of drama. Some folks found these books offensive. I found them fascinating. I love any story where people figure out how to survive and restart their community, because it gives me hope. And since this book takes place in a Greenwich, NY summer along the Battenkill River it's close enough for me to reach out and touch.

This will be our wrap-up discussion on the book! Feel free to share your ideas, thoughts, insights, and opinions in the comments!

P.S. Next Month's Pick involves a certain James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser....

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