“A World Made by Hand” by James Howard Kunstler

After the briefest of breaks, our beloved Jen is back and, never one to ease us in gently, she throws us headlong into the new year with a book that makes you sit straight up in your chair and say, “Wow.” James Howard Kunstler’s, “A World Made by Hand” is a sort of “back to the future” book in revese … if that makes any sense, and we, like Jen, are hooked.

I now feel a bit like the proverbial wolf-crying boy. If I am effusive about every book, then how on earth can I impress upon you when I really, reallyenjoy a book? I’m sure you see where I am heading with this self- flagalation … “World Made By Hand” is a good book.

A very good book.

One of my favorites in fact.

It also weirdly ties in with my recent rash of readings. The postulating I have been doing on the specialness of the trivial aspects of our lives. The fact that simplicity and appreciation beat a full flush every time. In times of trouble, less is more. Is it Divine intervention that these books keep falling in my lap? Possibly. I swear I just peruse the shelves and pick what looks interesting, but it seems awfully prescient in our current times.

A mix of Laura Ingalls Wilder and “The Host”, this book is about the future reverting to the past. Not far in the future, the world has changed radically. Terrorists have bombed enough major cities that global trade screeches to a halt and America is left alone and in turmoil. Government implodes as democracy is annihilated by lack of electrical power. As literal power is rendered obsolete, all communication is impossible. Without communication there is fear. Fear creates chaos. Order on a large scale is obsolete.

As one nation under god becomes divisible, the structured society we spent hundreds of years cultivating is burned to its roots.

Doctors, computer programers, college professors, bond traders et al are now farming the land. They are operating without anesthesia, building without power tools, and governing without structure. Everyone who is lucky enough to have escaped the carnage of the cities, the ravishes of both endemic and pandemic disease, and the cruelty of man, is trying to the same way that the pioneers had to live.

Food is home-grown, trading is minimal, clothes are made, and horses are prized. Without the “necessities” we had come to depend upon, a new kind of need is born. Music, food, warmth, water, light and friendship. TV, radio, cars, and modern medicine are all replaced by local churches, candlelit parties, town meetings and musicians.

A prosperous, happy man will be one who tends to the basic needs of his family and neighbors. People share crops and dairy. A sweet piece of walnut bread wrapped in cloth is a gift beyond measure.How well we would all do to remember that.

As we follow the major characters through hardship and fears, we find many joys inherent to this simpleness. People are brought together to survive. Small town companionship interwoven with reliance is a great gift. Love born from loss can be magnificently sweet.

The people who persevere are rewarded. They take pains to maintain fairness and avoid lawlessness. A new town government is instituted to achieve the original goal of the preamble to the constitution.It seems like small potatoes, but this is the new beginning … “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”