James Howard Kunstler

Join us the second Monday of each month from 5-6pm in the Readings Gallery for the Natural Concerns book group. We discuss contemporary and classic writings that explore the issues, insights and inspirations of our relationship with the natural world. With a focus that spans from our Pacific Northwest to earth-wide, you can expect beautiful and challenging non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and more. We are always reading something interesting! Authors DO NOT attend.

Monday, February 9, 5pm

World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler's latest book is a work of sobering speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades in the future.

Location: Street: 1200 11th St City: Bellingham, Province: Washington Postal Code: 98225-7015 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

A History of the Future is the third thrilling novel in Kunstler’s "World Made By Hand" series, an exploration of family and morality as played out in the small town of Union Grove. Following the catastrophes of the twenty-first century—the pandemics, the environmental disaster, the end of oil, the ensuing chaos—people are doing whatever they can to get by and pursuing a simpler and sometimes happier existence. In little Union Grove in upstate New York, the townspeople are preparing for Christmas. Without the consumerist shopping frenzy that dogged the holidays of the previous age, the season has become a time to focus on family and loved ones. It is a stormy Christmas Eve when Robert Earle’s son Daniel arrives back from his two years of sojourning throughout what is left of the United States. He collapses from exhaustion and illness, but as he recovers tells the story of the break-up of the nation into three uneasy independent regions and his journey into the dark heart of the New Foxfire Republic centered in Tennesee and led by the female evangelical despot, Loving Morrow. In the background, Union Grove has been shocked by the Christmas Eve double murder by a young mother, in the throes of illness, of her husband and infant son. Town magistrate Stephen Bullock is in a hanging mood. A History of the Future is attention-grabbing and provocative, but also lyrical, tender, and comic—a vision of a future of America that is becoming more and more convincing and perhaps even desirable with each passing day. James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly. His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it’s mutilated cities. This was followed by The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.” His 2008 novel, World Made By Hand, was a fictional depiction of the post-oil American future. The sequel to that book, The Witch of Hebron, was published in 2010. Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches and Maggie Darling. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues. Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.

Location: Street: Kleinert/James Center for the Arts Additional: 34 Tinker Street City: Woodstock, Province: New York Postal Code: 12498 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

A History of the Future is the third thrilling novel in Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series, an exploration of family and morality as played out in the small town of Union Grove.

Following the catastrophes of the twenty-first century—the pandemics, the environmental disaster, the end of oil, the ensuing chaos—people are doing whatever they can to get by and pursuing a simpler and sometimes happier existence. In little Union Grove in upstate New York, the townspeople are preparing for Christmas. Without the consumerist shopping frenzy that dogged the holidays of the previous age, the season has become a time to focus on family and loved ones. It is a stormy Christmas Eve when Robert Earle’s son Daniel arrives back from his two years of sojourning throughout what is left of the United States. He collapses from exhaustion and illness, but as he recovers tells the story of the break-up of the nation into three uneasy independent regions and his journey into the dark heart of the New Foxfire Republic centered in Tennesee and led by the female evangelical despot, Loving Morrow. In the background, Union Grove has been shocked by the Christmas Eve double murder by a young mother, in the throes of illness, of her husband and infant son. Town magistrate Stephen Bullock is in a hanging mood.

A History of the Future is attention-grabbing and provocative, but also lyrical, tender, and comic—a vision of a future of America that is becoming more and more convincing and perhaps even desirable with each passing day.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of World Made By Hand,The Long Emergency, The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and The City in Mind. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and many other periodicals. Kunstler's popular blog, Clusterf**k Nation, is published every Monday morning at kunstler.com and his weekly podcast, The KunstlerCast, is refreshed every Thursday.

Location: Street: 4869 Main St Additional: City: Manchester Center, Province: Vermont Postal Code: 05255 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

Sunday, November 18 @ 3pm BookEnds BookGroup to be discussing World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler BookEnds BookGroup meets every last Sunday of the month at 3 pm in MainStreet MarketPlace & Gallery. All are always welcome.

BookEnds BookGroup reads are 20% off in the store to participants.

Location: Street: 16 E Main St Additional: MainStreet MarketPlace & Gallery City: Warner, Province: New Hampshire Postal Code: 03278 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

Saratoga author James Howard Kunstler will sign his latest book Too Much Magic.

With vision, clarity, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time to begin preparing for the long emergency in American has begun.

Location: Street: 128 Jay St Additional: City: Schenectady, Province: New York Postal Code: 12305 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

Too Much Magic: With characteristic curmudgeonly enthusiasm, key commentator on the future, James Howard Kunstler brilliantly if belligerently shows us what a pickle we're in and how inept we are at dealing with it. With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for The Long emergency has begun.

James Howard Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since been profiled in The New Yorker and invited to speak at TED. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that, in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever.

Location: Street: 4869 Main St Additional: City: Manchester Center, Province: Vermont Postal Code: 05255 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

The Alumni Host Committee is proud to host The College and Brockport community once a month at the First Friday program. This program aims to connect faculty, staff and community members in a social setting. The event also showcases the beautiful Alumni House as well as the work of the College's all-volunteer alumni board.

For May, First Friday is happy to host alumni author Jim Kunstler. Mr. Kunstler is the author of many books which will be available to be purchased at the event. He will be happy to sign your copy.

James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, and the more recent The Long emergency (2005), where he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. He has written a science fiction novel conjecturing such a culture in the future, World Made by Hand and its sequel The Witch of Hebron. He also gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament" and a resultant change in the “American Way of Life.” He is also a leading proponent of the movement known as "New Urbanism."

First Friday will also feature a photo dedication to long time College at Brockport supporter, George Rich (1932-2011). First Friday is free and open to the public.

The Alumni House is at 142 Utica Street in Brockport.

Location: Street: Alumni House at The College at Brockport Additional: 142 Utica Street City: Brockport, Province: New York Postal Code: 14420 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (lisätietoja)

James Howard Kunstler lukee teosta World Made By Hand.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to host novelist and social commentator JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER as he reads from his new novel World Made by Hand.

In his nonfiction The Long Emergency, celebrated social commentator Kunstler explored how the age of globalization and mankind’s explosive progress over the last two hundred years was based on the availability of cheap fossil fuels. He observed that the terminal decline of oil production, combined with the perils of climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. Offering a shocking vision for the coming trauma of our post-oil future, The Long Emergency was a tremendous success and a bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies.

In World Made by Hand, a work of speculative fiction, Kunstler makes a leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like following the long emergency. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. After the catastrophes converged—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—they are doing whatever they can to get by. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure.

As the heat of summer intensifies, our narrator, Robert Earle, former marketing executive turned carpenter, and his fellow residents of Union Grove struggle with the new way of life. Their challenges play out in a fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. (ablachly)… (lisätietoja)