James Howard Kunstler

When summer arrives, tourists replace the city s usual residents, who instead flock to the countryside. But more and more people are moving to or closer to big cities, and they no longer work the land. At the same time, we are still as dependent on what the countryside has to offer in terms of food. What role will our rural designs and the cultivation of organic food play in the future? New Ruralism and Rural Agrarian Urbanism may provide solutions to these challenges. This book, with contributions from leading experts in the field, addresses issues such as sustainable food production and community planning.

November, 1963, the week before Thanksgiving. Twelve-year-old Jeff Greenaway, recently exiled from Manhattan to Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire prep school "for boys who behaved badly," wins big in a clandestine poker game. The next day, President John F. Kennedy is murdered in Dallas. The Ponsonby boys are sent home early by train for the holiday - and the president's funeral. Back at home with his parents on East 79th Street, and restless over the tragic events playing out on TV, Jeff ventures out into the city on his own, an explorer in the underbelly of Times Square and its colorful denizens. He falls hard for the teenage ingenue Kathy Kaine, star of the Broadway hit The Wayward Family Singers, who lives unsupervised in the historic Bomoseen Hotel uptown. It's a first romance for him, but not for her. Unable to swallow the official story about JFK's assassination, he stakes out the Russian Mission to the United Nations on 68th Street and Park Avenue, taunting the KBG goons who guard the entrance until Ambassador Zorin himself takes Jeff for a mind-bending ride into Central Park to explain how the world really works. Throughout his week of romance and international intrigue, Jeff becomes immersed in the world-changing novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and is finally driven to run away from the city, determined to meet J.D. Salinger, the book's reclusive author, who he finds back in New Hampshire - not far from Ponsonby Hall. As a blizzard sweeps through the state, "Jerry" Salinger is trapped in his farmhouse debating Hindu religion with Jeff Greenaway, a disciple of Salinger's own troubled, epic creation, Holden Caulfield. Set against the crackle of AM radios, Times Square dives, Park Avenue penthouses, and the uneasy hush that followed November 22, 1963, Look, I'm Gone is a razor-witted, big-hearted coming-of-age tale that captures the very moment America - and one smart-mouthed boy - lost their innocence. The novel seamlessly blends historical fiction, social satire, and teenage rebellion into an unforgettable journey from the Gothic rituals of prep-school to the vibrant, yet perilous, streets of mid-1960s Manhattan.

This is not a sob story. It's a story about the difficulties of growing into manhood and my own particular struggle with disabling anxiety that came along with it, and how I managed to find my way. That was more than fifty years ago. American life was more comfortable and comprehensible than it is now as we face the discords of what I call the long emergency. I still had a hard time. I observe that boys today are up against a whole lot more in their quest to become fully functional adult men.

This fifth installment of the Jeff Greenaway novella series finds our eleven-year-old hero shipped off from Manhattan for the summer (as usual) to Camp Timahoe, near the town of Lost Indian, Vermont, in the summer of 1963. All seems normal at first with Ahab the Arab playing all over the radio. But the camp seems to be mysteriously going to pieces. One by one, the counselors have disappeared until none are left... and the boys are on their own....

"Big Slide" is a three-act stage play. In a moment of unprecedented national political upheaval, members of the large Freeman family flee New York and Boston and take refuge in their Adirondack mountain mansion, called Big Slide. The electricity is down, and the Internet with it. Cities have been bombed and trouble has even come to these mountains, where extremist self-styled "regulators" are hunting down the rich and privileged. Big Slide is old-school, rousing, heart-pounding theater.

From the renowned social critic, energy expert, and bestselling author James Howard Kunstler, The Harrows of Spring concludes the quartet of his extraordinary World Made By Hand novels, set in an American future of economic and political collapse, where electricity, automobiles, and the familiar social structures of the ?old times” are a misty memory.In the little upstate New York town of Union Grove, springtime is a most difficult season, known as ?the six weeks want,” when fresh food is scarce and winter stores have dwindled. Young Daniel Earle returns from his haunting travels around what is left of the United States intent on resurrecting the town newspaper. He is also recruited by the town trustees to help revive the Hudson River trade route shut down peevishly by the local grandee, planter Stephen Bullock. Meanwhile, a menacing gang of Social Justice Warriors styling themselves as agents of the Berkshire People’s Republic appear one evening camped on the outskirts of town. Their leaders are the imposing Amazonian beauty Flame Aurora Greengrass and the charismatic grifter Sylvester ?Buddy” Goodfriend, progressive to a fault in their politics and determined to extract whatever tribute they can from the people of Union Grove.Romance, politics, bunko, violence, and family tragedy swirl through the thrilling finale to Kunstler’s bestselling series. The Harrows of Spring is a powerful, heart-wrenching, and satisfying conclusion to this poignant history of the future.

"In the fall of 1967, a schlemiel named Don Bessemer from Short Pump, Virginia, got me pregnant. Well, okay, I got myself pregnant with his assistance. I fell for this superficial clod one rainy October afternoon when we were the only two patrons in a hole-in-the-wall called Caf Ludovico off Astor Place. . . ." So begins the journey into adulthood of 19-year-old Erica "Pooh" (as in Winnie the) Bollinger from Oyster Bay, Long Island. She's a sophomore at NYU and nothing is working out there. She's knocked up. She hates the city. The Vietnam War is making America crazy, not to mention the sit-com looniness of everyday existence on the home-front. Pooh desperately wants out. She hears about a magical place up in Vermont where you can leave all this crap behind, a commune called Sunrise Village founded by the mysterious, charismatic figure known in the hippie underground only as "Songbird." Maybe she ought to go up there and check the situation out. . . .

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.

"The best streets in the world's villages, towns, and cities—whether modest or grand—continually remind one that simplicity is part of the recipe for success in this art. The advice of Victor Dover and John Massengale, their historic examples and their own designs, reflect that simplicity." —From the Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales “Street Design is a lucid, practical and altogether indispensable guide for envisioning and creating vibrant 21st century towns and cities. It should be required reading for every local political leader, planner, architect, real estate developer and engaged urban citizen in America." —Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 and author of True Believers "We are going to start walking around the places we live again, and as that occurs and becomes normal, we will rapidly redevelop a demand for higher quality in building at the human scale." —From the Afterword by James Howard Kunstler “Your charrette traveling library must include the important Street Design book by Victor Dover and John Massengale.”—Bill Lennertz, Executive Director, National Charrette Institute “What an amazing resource! For those who wish that my book, Walkable City, had pictures, this is the book for you. If either your work or your play includes the making of places, you will find Street Design to be an invaluable tool.” —Jeff Speck, AICP, CNU-A, LEED-AP, Hon. ASLA Written by two accomplished architects and urban designers, this user-friendly street design manual shows both how to design new streets and enhance existing ones. It offers step-by-step instruction and shares examples of excellent streets, examining the elements that make them successful as well as how they were designed and created. Topics also include strategies for shaping space in the public right-of-way through correct building height to street width ratios, terminated vistas, landscaping, and street geometry. This book is a valuable resource for urban designers, planners, architects, and engineers. With guest essays from: Kaid Benfield, David Brussat, Javier Cenicacelaya, Hank Dittmar, Andres Duany, Douglas Duany, Emily Glavey, Chip Kaufman, Ethan Kent, Marieanne Khoury-Vogt, Léon Krier, Gianni Longo, Thomas Low, Laura Lyon, Chuck Marohn, Paul Murrain, John Norquist, Stefanos Polyzoides, Gabriele Tagliaventi and Erik Vogt.

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. "Too Much Magic" is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler's image of the future is much more sober. 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.

Renowned social commentator and best-selling author James Howard Kunstler's sequel to World Made by Hand, expands on his vision of post-oil society in America in this "suspenseful, darkly amusing story with touches of the fantastic in the mode of Washington Irving" (Booklist). In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. Travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life, but Union Grove is no pastoral haven. Wars are fought over dwindling resources and illness is a constant presence. Bandits roam the countryside, preying on the weak and a sinister cult threatens to shatter the town's fragile stability. In a novel that is both shocking yet eerily convincing, Kunstler seamlessly weaves hot-button issues such as the decline of oil and the perils of climate change into a compelling narrative of violence, religious hysteria, innocence lost, and love found.

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.Architect Leon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London "gherkin" as an example of "priapus hubris" (threatened by detumescence and "priapus nemesis"); he charts "Random Uniformity" ("fake simplicity") and "Uniform Randomness" ("fake complexity"); he draws bloated "bulimic" and disproportionately scrawny "anorexic" columns flanking a graceful "classical" one; and he compares "private virtue" (modernist architects' homes and offices) to "public vice" (modernist architects' "creations"). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of "architectural speech" rather than "architectural stutter," and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of "sub-urban man" versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we "build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers"; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.

In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. 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. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever.

Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a startling vision of what lies ahead, bringing new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and which we can no longer ignore.The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the age of oil, that fuelled this expansion, is coming rapidly to an end. The depletion of fossil fuels is about to transform life as we know it, and do so much sooner than we think. In The Long Emergency, the distinguished commentator and analyst James Howard Kunstler explains what to expect after we pass the tipping point of peak oil production, and sets out to prepare us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.

America's millionaire goddess of media domesticity, Maggie Darling's perfect life is dissolved by matrimonial meltdown, thanks to her unfaithful investment banker husband, and she embarks on a year of romantic misadventure as she has a fling with a British rock star, becomes entangled with a gangsta rap group, and is seduced by her book editor. Reprint.

In the highly acclaimed The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler declared suburbia "a tragic landscape" and fueled a fierce debate over how we will live in twenty-first-century America. Here, Kunstler turns his discerning eye to urban life in America and beyond in dazzling excursions to classical Rome, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Louis-Napoleon's Paris, the "gigantic hairball" that is contemporary Atlanta, the ludicrous spectacle of Las Vegas, and more. Seeking to discover what is constant and enduring in cities at their greatest, Kunstler explores how America got lost in suburban wilderness and locates pathways that might lead to civic revival. His authoritative tour is both a concise history of cities and a stunning critique of how they can aid or hinder social and civil progress. By turns dramatic and comic, The City in Mind is an exceptional glimpse into the urban condition.