World Without Salad Shooters

I just finished World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler. World is a post-apocalyptic, post-peak oil vision of a future without salad shooters. It begins a few years after the power has gone off and the cars have stopped running. Suffice it to say that things get kind of rough as all central authority collapses and people often find themselves at the mercy of thugs and warlords. On the other hand, something resembling a genuine community emerges in the remains of the small Upstate New York town where the novel is set. It occurred to me as I was reading that World would make a great movie--and if it had the good fortune to appear shortly after President McCain were to bomb Iran, sending gas to six or seven dollars a gallon--it would be a big hit.

Kunstler is either the world's greatest crackpot on the subject of peak oil, or a prophet that we should all heed. Either way, he is one of the few people worth reading (he has a weekly column and sometimes contributes to The American Conservative and Orion) these days. The New York Times should have hired him instead of that neocon hack. He is also worth seeing in person: