Epidemics have reduced the population to mere handfuls of survivors struggling to eke out an existence in a decidedly unforgiving landscape, all but cut off from the rest of the world. A series of disasters have rendered America into a virtual Third World country. A former high-powered software executive, he is now trudging through middle age in a small isolated town in upstate New York, his wife, children and livelihood having fallen victim to the Long Emergency. Robert Earle doesn't seem particularly likeable when we first meet him.

The story unfolds through the voice of his main character.

Using fiction's power to open us up to ideas in ways nonfiction often fails to do, he gives us a vivid depiction of the kind of world he has described in his other works. In World Made By Hand, Kunstler returns to the realm of the novel. He has been sounding this warning for well over a decade, though I can't help but wonder if he sometimes feels like a voice in the wilderness. In such books as The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, he has set forth a cogent argument that the automobile culture we currently take for granted is on the verge of disappearing, leaving in its wake a populace stranded in isolated suburban sprawl marked by abandoned strip malls-what he has called 'Potemkin village shopping plazas'-cut off from all but their most immediate neighbors. James Kunstler may best be known nowadays as one of the preeminent voices advocating the adoption of realistic policies designed to address the looming oil shortage we most certainly are facing. Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pages

Kunstler world made by hand