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"Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was."
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World Made by HandThe old high school complex itself was a 1970s-vintage modernist monst — World Made by Hand
"The old high school complex itself was a 1970s-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other schools around the nation from the period. Seeing the building usually made me deeply sad and even a little angry, the way that old refrigerator in my garden did. Its vision of yesterdays tomorrow seemed pitiful. Children like my Daniel and Genna had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty-five years old in "smart" computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about [it]. Not because theres something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because thats where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had… happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid. Thinking about all that got me so agitated, I took off up the road. Motion is a great tranquilizer."
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World Made by Hand
World Made by Hand
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World Made by Hand is a dystopian and social science fiction novel by American author James Howard Kunstler, published in 2008. Set in the fictional town of Union Grove, New York, the novel follows a cast of characters as they navigate a world stripped of its modern comforts, ravaged by terrorism, epidemics, and the economic upheaval of peak oil, all of which are exacerbated by global warming.
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"The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices... were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation."
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World Made by HandQuote
"I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were."
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World Made by HandQuote
"It was obvious there would be no return to [what we used to call] "normality." The [resource-intensive] economy wouldnt be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history."
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World Made by HandQuote
"... I had a pistol every bit as lethal tucked in the rear of my belt, next to my skin, underneath my shirttails. Id been carrying it [for] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in."
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World Made by HandQuote
"I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out until there was nothing."
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World Made by Hand