World Made by Hand A Novel by James Howard Kunstler A Book Sense Selection ISBN: 0-8021-4401-2 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4401-0 US $14.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 336 pp - Jan. 2009

Excerpt:
We came to Union Grove, Sandy’s home town, after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. It tanked the whole U.S. economy. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. The freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went back to their nation of origin with their cargoes undelivered. The earth stopped being flat and became very round again.

I was thirty-six then. We sold the house in Brookline at a substantial loss just to get out. We dumped the big BMW and kept the sedan. You could still get gasoline, though it was very expensive and the scarcities were worsening. We wanted to be as far away from the action as we could get without leaving the northeast. Sandy’s father was alive then, a retired vice president of the nearby Glens Falls National Bank. Pneumonia took Bill two years after we arrived. Common antibiotics were in short supply. In a way, I was glad he went before Sandy and Genna and everything else that happened, because it would have broken his heart. He was absolutely a man of the twentieth century. His last coherent words, in the delirium of illness, were, “Don’t worry, I’ll bring the car around. . . .”