I am jealous of hell of author Duncan Crary. Might as well admit it right up front.

In my 25 years in radio, I interviewed Jim Kunstler maybe a dozen times, usually short chats to get a sound bite for a news story about local development issues in the Albany/Saratoga Springs/Glens Falls, New York area that I spent my entire radio career broadcasting in and around. A couple of times I did longer interviews with Kunstler, the author of a number of brilliant books about culture and cultural collapse, including the non-fiction landmarks The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, and a pair of hugely entertaining and thought-provoking novels, World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron. A year ago, I profiled his appearance at a local book fair. I admit it, I enjoy reading Kunstler’s writing, and I enjoy picking his brain every chance I get. But Crary is the visionary broadcaster who got the idea to sit down with him week-in and week-out for a wildly entertaining and informative podcast, The KunstlerCast. 

In Crary’s deceptively compact new book of the same name, you’ll find the ultimate primer to everything Kunstler, as the author has mined scores of the duo’s podcasts to create an indispensable document of James Howard Kunstler’s personal history, philosophy, observations and predictions.

Crary doesn’t put on kid gloves in their interviews, for example tackling head-on the popular perception that Kunstler was wrong about Y2K (he wasn’t; it could have been a global catastrophe, but because it was a comprehensible, solvable problem, the disaster was averted). There are even a few passages where the pair don’t seem quite simpatico on some issue or other, and Kunstler’s bristling fairly electrifies the page. He’s a crusty curmudgeon, as readers of his weekly Clusterfuck Nation blog no doubt are aware, but Kunstler’s sharp edges are greatly mitigated by the fact that he is a blunt, no-bullshit observer of our times and our culture, and the book nicely encapsulates just why I’ve held JHK in very high esteem over the past couple of decades.  

Readers new to Kunstler will come away with a much better picture of his place in our culture. He is frequently dismissed as a “doom-and-gloom naysayer,” but it’s impossible to come away from these discussions with Crary without understanding in full that Kunstler believes once we get past the long emergency we are now fully engaged in, we could come out of it on the other side with a better world, operating at a more human scale, with smarter priorities and strategies for living. In fact, we have no choice, if the human race is to continue. The Happy Motoring Era, as Kunstler calls the past century-plus of cheap energy and cheaper lifestyles, is now racing so quickly to its conclusion that we are all dizzy from the ride and no longer able to deny that we see where this is all going. There can be imagined no better map and guide than The KunstlerCast book. Stick one in your go-bag and take it on the road with you in your inevitable post-apocalyptic trek through the wasteland that was once America. Let it keep you company as you Occupy your hometown. Put it on the shelves with the rest of your intelligent, forward-looking and wickedly funny books. But whatever you do, buy it and read it. You’re lost without it.

I’m a decade older than my wife, a diabetic of nearly 14 years with a family history of Alzheimer’s and two particularly nasty types of cancer. And yet, I’ve felt pretty well this year, while my wife has had Lyme disease and other medical problems necessitating multiple day surgeries and more trips to the hospital in less than a year than I want to make in my entire lifetime. As I finished the final chapter of Roger Ebert’s glorious new memoir Life Itself, I was informed by my son that his mother had decided while they were out delivering a gift to her mother for her birthday, that she felt unwell enough to stop in and see a doctor at our local health center. This morning, I would have told you that my wife was recovering nicely from her recent procedures. Now it’s afternoon and that is in question. This seems to be the year I am learning one of the same lessons Roger Ebert has learned, which is that your health is subject to change without notice.

My one-way relationship with Ebert goes back to the days when he and fellow Chicago film critic Gene Siskel hosted a movie review program on PBS. I was probably in my mid-teens the first time I saw the two of them discuss (and frequently argue about) the movies of the day. Now, I know a lot about comic books and it seems like I always have, but I know little about film (although, as they say, I know what I like). It didn’t matter, though, because what I liked about Siskel and Ebert on my TV was not the movies they discussed, but how they discussed them. (The learned Ebert scholar will recognize that last sentence as a paraphrase of one of his frequent dictums, by the way.)

I always loved watching the two of them talk, battle, fight, engage. Whether on their own PBS series, or the syndicated commercial program that succeeded it, or the one after that, or on Late Night With David Letterman or on The Howard Stern Show, you could always, always count on Siskel and Ebert (back then it was really just one word) to make you laugh, and often to make you think.

But I’ll admit I was not always a faithful follower of Ebert’s actual day job, as a syndicated writer/critic whose pieces appeared daily, or nearly so, in newspapers around the country. I guess when he reviewed a movie I was interested in, I would read that sort of piece, but as I cruised kind of stupidly through my 20s and 30s, wasted decades I wish I could get back in many ways, I did not seek him out as a writer in the way I do now. And what changed that was the cancer that took away Ebert’s ability to ever eat, drink or speak out loud again.

I definitely noticed when Ebert first got sick and disappeared from the airwaves. I didn’t think a whole lot of it at the time, but I did notice that he seemed not to be reviewing anything on TV or in print, and by that time, the mid-2000s, I had come to count more and more on his opinion before venturing out for a night at the movies. In point of fact, there’s no one whose opinion I trust more when it comes to movie criticism. I was greatly receptive to Pauline Kael’s critical taste and authorial voice, but I only discovered it towards the very end of her life and had to work backwards to see what I had missed. But at the time Ebert disappeared from the scene, I really was quite accustomed to his company, his opinion, his presence in my life, however short the time we were spending together on a weekly basis.

If you’re at all interested in Ebert as a writer or human being, you already know the grueling details of the illnesses and accidents that took away his jaw and much of his mobility, so I won’t recount them here. Besides, he reveals all in Life Itself and I really feel quite strongly that you should read this book, so I’ll let him tell you what happened. The important thing is, what happened to him absolutely transformed him as a writer. No less an observer than Studs Terkel pointed out to Ebert that the way in which he turned to the internet and blogging to find a new voice to replace his lost one was a stunning and gratifying reversal of fortune. I can’t say I am glad Ebert suffered as he did, but I can say I am enormously grateful for the increased and enhanced output he has since issued forth as a writer. I know that every week I can count on one or more new Roger Ebert essays on life, family, politics, health, spirituality and many other subjects, popping up in my RSS feed reader and ready to nourish my soul with his intelligence, his wit, and a lifetime of collected wisdom.

Ebert wasn’t always wise, although I think he was always meant to be so. In Life Itself he is frank and open about his failures, many of which are connected to his alcoholism, which he overcame many years before life made it impossible for him to drink. Much of the pain in his life seems to stem from his mother’s own alcohol problems, and whatever grace and genius Ebert possesses now clearly comes despite, not because of, her treatment of him when she was at her worst. But he also concedes she could be a great woman, and in one brilliant passage explains in a universally relatable way how his mother could be one person around a group of people, and very different when tearing into him drunk, when they were alone. In this and other passages, Ebert clearly and lucidly explains the duality we all possess, and puts into words the bittersweet awareness of the good and bad in everyone, especially everyone dear to us.

There are many people dear to Ebert, some gone, some still with him, all memorialized and celebrated in Life Itself. The book is not just a recounting of his own life history – in fact, there is some jumping around in time and repeated anecdotes that reinforce his narrative and appeal like the chorus of a particularly hummable tune – but Ebert also delves into the stories and legends of many of the people he has known, from obscure, distant family members to noteworthy and notorious celebrities, fellow writers, and most poignantly to me, Ebert’s longtime partner Gene Siskel. The chapter on Siskel ends with what could be just a funny story about how the two of them would make sure they took turns sitting in the chair closest to David Letterman in their late night talk-show appearances, but in even this seemingly minor story, Ebert mines the experience for every bit of meaning and nuance. I didn’t break down in tears reading Life Itself, but I came close in reading that section. I love Roger Ebert as a critic, as a writer and as a human being, but Siskel and Ebert together were one of my first loves, and losing them as partners still hurts to this day. Perhaps that is why I am so profoundly grateful to still have Ebert’s voice to inform and regale me, and why I am quite certain you will love Life Itself as much as I did. Like the very best movies, I can tell you that I savoured every moment,  was sad when it ended, and was eager to tell others how wonderful it is, an obligation I learned from Roger Ebert. As Alec Baldwin once said in a movie I can never get enough of, “Go forth and do likewise.”
 

Buy Life Itself: A Memoir from Amazon.com. A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review.

I really wanted to like this new Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle, but barely made it to the end of the first episode. Spoilers ahead, in case you plan to give it a go.

Everything about this debut effort annoyed, from the splitscreen allowing SMG’s twin characters Bridget and Siobhan to interact, to the acting by almost every lead on the show. Gellar and Ioan “Mr. Fantastic” Gruffudd (here using what I presume is his real accent, at least) both felt like they were phoning it in to get the Pilot payday and hoping it doesn’t go to series and occupy the next seven years of their life. SMG really only seems believable as Bridget, an ex-stripper in witness protection, while twin sister Siobhan, ice-cold and two-dimensional, seems to be Emma Frost by way of Jackie O’s sunglasses. Only Nestor Carbonell, who you may remember as immortal eyeliner guy Richard from Lost, seemed committed to his character, enough so that he seemed familiar, and then near the end I went, “Oh, he’s that guy from Lost.” But at least I bought into his character’s existence and dedication to his job. The actor playing Henry, the guy sleeping with Siobhan, Mr. Fantastic’s wife, is so insubtantial as to barely be there. One is hardly convinced a wealthy woman, even one as eeeeevil as Siobhan, would compromise her marriage for such a vacuous twit. 

Watched this with my son, who was convinced that Siobhan was dead after the boat incident (featuring the lousiest bluescreen/splitscreen effects of the episode) that allows Bridget to assume Siobhan’s identity. I told him “You don’t hire SMG to play identical twins and kill one off for real in the first episode. Just like we’re going to see that gun go off, we’re going to see Bridget’s sister again.” Would have thought they’d saved it for a week or two, though, not for the profoundly cliche-ridden final scene of the pilot.

Ringer wants very much to be this season’s Dollhouse — stylish, chilly, with untapped depths of mystery and cool, and obviously descending from Buffy, not to mention the alt.rock girl-and-guitar music montage featuring a bizarre cover of Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 — but it’s just Lifetime movie-of-the-week-level awful. 

Click over to Trouble With Comics to read my review of the first issue of IDW’s new Star Trek comic book series, which takes place in the new Trek universe after the events of the 2009 movie.

Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon is one of the most poorly-written and badly-edited biographies it’s ever been my displeasure to read. The author’s obsessive accounting of every possible indication that Seinfeld is probably gay ultimately implies, quite strongly, that the comedian’s notorious public relationships (one with a 17-year-old girl when Seinfeld was 39, one with a married woman who later left her husband and married Seinfeld, bearing his children) are merely cynical distractions from his true sexuality. 

One of my longtime pet peeves has been the way in which some gay and lesbian celebrities have gone to extreme lengths to cover up the truth about their sexuality. I don’t care what any two or more consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms (or anywhere else, pretty much), but I do think that the struggle for the recognition of equal marriage (and other) rights could have progressed far further than it has if more queer celebrities had been willing to plainly state their sexual orientation  earlier than whenever you’d care to pin the date that it started to become more common practice. That said, I do recognize the right to privacy of every individual, and I guess that’s where Oppenheimer’s book really rubs me the wrong way.

Jerry Seinfeld, gay. It could be true, or it could be the author’s fevered imaginings; whatever the truth, the manner in which Oppenheimer returns again and again and again to his thesis on virtually every page of the book (I only wish I were exaggerating) seems sensationalist, embittered and not a little bit like the sour grapes of a lover, scorned. I came to the book looking for insight into the formative years and working methods of one of our smartest and funniest living comedians. Instead, I got a non-stop litany of not-even-veiled references to Seinfelds love of theatre and theatrics, and his fabulous friendships with other flamboyant, usually black, comedians. The final product feels like the fruit of a poisoned tree, not so much biography as the dull head of the ax Oppenheimer cannot stop himself from grinding. Avoid at all costs.

I couldn’t ever hope to match the output or quality of buddy Chris Allen’s recent record reviews, but I will say that I have enjoyed the hell out of watching him stretch his critical muscles in a way I never would have predicted, despite having been aware for years of his deep love for music. Thus inspired, I thought I’d run down a list of five of my favourite albums. Not my “Top Five,” but five CDs that mean quite a lot to me, and in most cases, have for many years.

The Church  - Starfish

The flawless production on this album full of great and near-great songs make it one of my favourites of the 1980s and a frequent virtual spin on my MP3 player. “Under The Milky Way” has always struck a pretty profound chord with me, but the spacey, mysterious “Destination,” the propulsive “Reptile” and the charming “Hotel Womb” always get me humming along too.

Simple Minds - Once Upon a Time

Simple Minds is too gifted a band for me to really single out one album as a favourite, but this one came out during my critical college radio years and almost every track is a pop masterpiece. Five of the eight tracks are on my cherished homemade compilation CD (which really is just a file folder on my PC and MP3 player, as I have no CD player at the moment — the screwy wiring in our house seems to burn them out within days every time I invest in a new one). “Alive and Kicking” is one of those songs that I don’t think about every day, but when I hear it I realize it’s one of the great anthems of my personal life soundtrack.

David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

I wrote about this album fairly extensively not long ago, so go read that post and gaze in wide wonder that I forgot to even mention “Strange Overtones,” one of the two or three best songs on the album, and the only single to get any airplay at all, as far as I know. What we once would have thought of as “Side One” (in other words, the first half of the CD, youngster) is a knockout, and a big “Screw you” to whichever reviewer it was that disparaged the eerie third track, “I My Stuff,” which I think is one of Byrne’s better solo tracks.

Pete Townshend - White City A Novel

A concept album that I am too lazy to look up the concept of, but you know where Wikipedia is if you really care. Now, I am not a huge fan of The Who; my compilation folder for them, I think, has six songs in it, including all the CSI theme songs, because I just happen to really like those tracks, not because I like CSI (I really, truly don’t). But this solo Townshend album gets pretty frequent play at my house, because it just seems very personal and raw and also features some amazing contributions from David Gilmour on guitar. I don’t think or care about music as much as a lot of people I like and respect (I’m talking right at you, Christopher Allen!), but I wish I did. But at least I do have a few guitar gods in my personal pantheon, including Lindsey Buckingham, Mark Knopfler, and David Gilmour, all of whom astonish and amaze me with their ability to use a piece of wood and some metal bits to craft a second voice for themselves that is uniquely their own. White City A Novel has in common with all the other albums on this list the fact that it just works from start to finish, with little-to-no unnecessary bits on it.

Tool - Lateralus

Tool is a band that, 15 years ago, not only would I have not liked, but would have actively run like hell from. The weird iconography, the frequently disturbing subject matter of their music, hell, the band’s very name would have driven me away. But for some reason, one night talking to d. emerson eddy on AIM during the heyday of Comic Book Galaxy, he mentioned the song “Schism” (a brilliant, standout track on this album packed full of ‘em) to me, and I listened to it, and my musical universe expanded just a bit. The propulsive guitar, the stupefying loudness and profound stillness, and the mercurial vocal instrument of Maynard James Keenan all drive themselves right into the core of my being, and this album, their best, does it better than any other.

Is there a more paradoxical voice in rock than David Byrne’s? His vocals can be sneering, cold, observant and dark, and yet his lyrics almost invariably reveal a deep, thoughtful soul keenly interested in his fellow human beings. Whether with or without his former band Talking Heads, his smooth intonations act as another musical instrument in time to the often syncopated beats of the music he is a part of. Few vocalists speak to me as clearly and directly as David Byrne, and on 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (created with longtime collaborator Brian Eno), he uses his silvery instrument to address very human issues: Home, time, relationships and compassion.

The lead-off track is “Home,” a measured reflection on what it means and feels like to have a home and to be able to be there, and the agony of not having one and being unable to be there. The languid, campfire-style beats of the song suggest the end of a cycle, not the beginning. My own theory of the album is that it finds Byrne coming to grips with his former life as the frontman for one of the great rock bands of the past thirty years, and in this way “Home” serves as a summation of what has gone before, before Byrne (and creative partner Brian Eno) begin exploring some other musical territories. The song also serves as a magnificently welcoming introduction to the themes and concerns of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, “connecting to places that we have known.”

The round-the-campfire feel of “Home,” continues into the second track, “My Big Nurse,” in which Byrne’s lyrics focus on ideas of comfort and thankfulness and “counting all the possibilities for dancing on this lazy afternoon.” Track three, “I Feel My Stuff,” begins with a discordant mingling of instruments that soon coheres into a dark but familiar syncopation. Byrne tightly controls his voice on this one, transitioning from a near-whisper at the start to a bold, confidently clipped vocalization that suggests hidden knowledge and an upper hand. The eerie bridge suggests a terrifying midnight drive filled with fear and paranoia and wouldn’t be out of place in one of director David Lynch’s darkest fantasies, say, Lost Highway.

The title song “Everything That Happens,” blends music-box tinkling with Byrne’s cosmic suburban incantations. More than any other song on the album, “Everything That Happens” feels like Byrne exploring the concerns of an entire lifetime from infancy to uncertain adulthood and the accompanying fears for the future. The chorus tells us that “Everything that happens will happen today, and nothing has changed but nothing’s the same. And every tomorrow will be yesterday, and everything that happens will happen today.” Those are at once some of Byrne’s simplest and yet most complex lyrics ever, suggesting as they do an understanding of time and life that goes beyond the dimensions we perceive in our everyday life, and acknowledging that the future we wonder about will, indeed, one day be yesterday.

The quiet, near-hymnal intonations of “The Lighthouse” draw the album to a close with musical accompaniment by Eno that most vividly recalls the producer’s dreamy, ethereal contributions to U2’s Unforgettable Fire as Byrne croons reassuringly about “standing out by the lighthouse,” where one would wait for others to come — making connections, or warning them away? The warm and enveloping tone of this track and many others on the album suggest a welcoming embrace, an indication that Byrne is profoundly comfortable creating these musical worlds to inhabit, an invitation to the willing to join him in the home he and Eno have built together.

Almost everything we think we know about sex is wrong, and that plain fact has destroyed an unthinkable number of lives over the past few thousand years, right up until the current moment, when bullying of LGBT youth in schools is leading to misery, violence and suicide.

In a blurb on the cover, the indispensable sex columnist Dan Savage calls Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Human Sexuality “The single most important book [on the subject of sex] since Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior of the Human Male on the American public in 1948,” and I wouldn’t argue that point. If you’ve ever been confused by the conflict between your sexual drives and the demands of the society around you, Sex at Dawn has some answers for you. If you’ve ever wondered why the hell things are as screwed up as they are in our modern world, especially here in Los Estados Unidos, well, look no further.

Using logic, science and rationality, authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá investigate the unknown and largely unguessed-at sexual natures of our earliest ancestors, and they find that many modern rituals, activities and interests, everything from threesomes and bisexuality to cuckolding and bukkake, all have solid and explainable foundations in normal sexual activity among the great apes, among which the authors count Homo Sapiens, because, well, that’s what we are. Right out of the box Ryan and Jethá dispose of the bigoted and harmful idea of human exceptionalism and set out on an exploration of sex between human apes and their closest living relatives, bonobos and chimps, to see what we have in common, and where it all went wrong.

The development of agriculture seems to be the answer, when our ancestors were transformed from animals that lived off the land and had more time for pleasure and recreation and less insane ideas about sex, to today, when the artificial scarcity of resources has resulted in a twisting of sexuality into the cruel, brutal mindfuck that it is for the vast majority of human beings that have ever engaged in a sexual thought, feeling or experience.

The authors argue, quite convincingly, that many of the elements of modern Western sexual exchange are not evolutionary mandates but rather adaptive (and therefore changeable) behaviours designed to help navigate the culture’s brutal and counter-intuitive ideas about monogamy, parenthood, marriage, fidelity, and almost every other element that crosses over into the realm of our most intimate and primal sexual needs, drives and desires. Ultimately it’s about sex becoming a brutal weapon of power and control in human beings rather than a liberating and life-affirming force for good, as it is in our cousin apes the bonobos.

I’ve already lost most people reading this, I’m sure, and there’s no question that the premise that Ryan and Jethá lay out will generate a metric fuck-ton of rage and denial from anyone whose ideas about their own (and others’, sadly) sexuality are tied up in concepts of an invisible god in the sky who knows what’s best for you and your pee-pee, and very possibly not a few atheists and alleged libertines who are nearly as invested in society’s perversion of human sexuality. How tortured have we all been by what we want versus what we’ve been told, and maybe even believe, is true? The authors mention at one point that the massive force of will required to subsume and conceal female sexuality over the past few thousand years hints at the true scope of female sexuality unleashed, and that’s just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of obvious-once-you-think-about-it concepts that Sex at Dawn will drop in your lap and leave you thinking about likely for all the rest of your days.



Why do many men get turned on by the idea of their wife or girlfriend having sex with someone else? Why is it that men are done with sexual intercourse the moment they achieve orgasm, and yet women are just getting started and literally could (and would like to) experience a dozen more? Why is it that one can truly love one’s spouse and yet face diminishing sexual interest that threatens to destroy one’s family, one’s standing in the community and even their relationship with the offspring they created with that spouse?

The honest and scientifically provable answers to all these questions, and many more, are found in Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Human Sexuality. Ryan and Jethá are honest and upfront about the fact that they can’t solve the many cruel (even deadly) conundrums that our modern sexual culture has left us with. But they do point the way (with the help of our cousins the bonobos) to a better and more harmonious way for us to deal with our sexual needs and with the world around us, a way to balance the differences and commonalities between male and female natures, and above all they suggest that this impressive book, which will change the thinking of anyone who comes to it with an open mind, is a good starting point to at least get people talking to each other — to their lovers, especially — about the truth about sexuality. The truth for each of us as individuals, and for all of us as a race of great apes, with the great and unique intellectual gift of language and self-knowledge, who have gone so very far down the wrong road of our sexual natures that many of us now believe dying is the only way to end the pain we have inflicted upon the very essence of ourselves as human beings.

Visit sexatdawn.com.

Running away from reality, and searching for something lost or unknown are the twin themes that define James Howard Kunstler’s new novel The Witch of Hebron (Atlantic Monthly Press). Subtitled A World Made by Hand Novel, the book is a sequel to Kunstler’s initial exploration of the world after it all goes even further to hell than it already has here in our real world.

In Kunstler’s landmark non-fiction book The Long Emergency, the writer and social critic warned passionately and convincingly of the nigh-apocalyptic results likely to come to pass as a result of the untimely but inevitable confluence of a number of paradigm shifts that we seem to be in the middle of: Peak Oil, climate change, and the collapse of economic delusions that, even as I write this, seem to be slowly, agonizingly bringing the entire planet to its knees (in fact, Kunstler recently declared on his blog that he believes we are now in Phase Two of The Long Emergency).

In Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, the author turned his talents to fiction to illustrate what is likely to happen after the dust is settled, the oil is gone, the wars are over (and in fact, impossible) and the world has become much larger and filled with unknowns (there are rumors that an American government still exists somewhere, but with no power to communicate beyond the sound of one’s own voice, no one is quite sure – the only thing known for certain is that both Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles were destroyed by nukes before the times completely transformed into the new world).

And so The Witch of Hebron finds Kunstler returning again to the fictional but very fully-realized town of Union Grove, in Washington County, New York. The story picks up just months after the climax of World Made by Hand, and many of the same characters (the hokey but mystical Brother Jobe, the profoundly decent and deeply human Robert Earle, mayor of Union Grove), return. There are new people to learn about as well, most notably the psychopathic self-aggrandizing bandit Billy Bones, and the titular and altogether mesmerizing (to the characters, and to this reader) Witch of Hebron, Barbara Maglie. The main focus of the story, though, is on 11-year old Jasper Copeland, son of the town doctor and the character whose brash but sympathetic actions drive the narrative. Jasper suffers a great loss and strikes out in his pain, utilizing what he has learned as the son of the town’s doctor to take unwise revenge, and then fleeing Union Grove for the promise of the near-legendary city of Glens Falls, twenty miles and a world away.

Jasper has heard many things about Glens Falls and hopes to start a new life there, where he can apprentice with a doctor and hide from the shame and agony of what he has done. Unfortunately for him, he meets up with the quite insane (but nonetheless somewhat charming, in his own ridiculous way) Billy Bones along the way; additionally, Glens Falls isn’t quite what it used to be, as Kunstler lays out in an astonishing travelogue along one of its former main roads. Meanwhile, back in Union Grove, the victim of Jasper’s revenge uses some supernatural means to determine who is responsible for what has happened, and where he might currently be, and all the narrative lines begin to flow inexorably (and joyously – Kunstler’s storytelling here flows like the mighty Hudson on a sun-dappled fall afternoon) toward the well-appointed and dream-like home of The Witch of Hebron.

Kunstler’s regular weekly essays on his website frequently decry the denial and immaturity of the American mindset that has gotten us where we are today, and I am sure it’s no coincidence that Jasper’s initial actions and choices seem to stem from similar drives. His actions set him on a journey that will decide the rest of his life, just as Kunstler no doubt believes that the choices being made every day on the personal and national level will define our culture and way of life for decades and even centuries to come. The author doesn’t hit us over the head with themes and metaphors, though – even more so than World Made by Hand, The Witch of Hebron is first and foremost a rollercoaster ride through a new world of broken highways and dim memories of another time. One dazzling sequence finds a character remembering fondly a time when imported delights and spectacular delicacies were as close as a stop at the nearest supermarket, a luxury no one at all can enjoy in the new times of The Witch of Hebron.

On the other hand, Kunstler suggests with great power and detail the very real pleasures that could stand revealed after the end of our current world. The Witch of Hebron establishes a place where the Bloomin’ Onion is gone but not forgotten (it is, in fact, fondly remembered, and in great detail), but where such deep-fried and ultimately destructive treats have been supplanted by real, local foods that are devoured by the residents of Union Grove with a gusty hedonism no doubt inspired by the very real struggle it would take to create such sustenance by hand. Whether a character is eating mashed potatoes with real, locally produced butter or the inescapable staple cornbread (wheat won’t grow in the part of the world these stories are told in), one gets the feeling that each bite is pondered over and enjoyed because it is the product of hard work, and not easily gotten. Kunstler is often criticized for having a “doom and gloom” perspective, but the joy his characters take in the simplest pleasures and necessities show that he not only believes a better world can come out of our current transformative times, but that it almost by definition has to.

There’s a good deal of the supernatural to be found in The Witch of Hebron, as you might expect from the title. Some people seem to carry special abilities that were unknown in the old (i.e., our) times. Being a loyal and enthusiastic follower of Kunstler’s blunt, no-nonsense non-fiction, I had been both surprised and even a bit put off by World Made by Hand’s more fantastical elements (especially the powers of Brother Jobe). But such mysticism and exploration of the unknown is a common element in post-apocalyptic fiction (see Stephen King’s The Stand as perhaps the best example, or better yet, The Bible’s Book of Revelations), and it stands to reason that once the world stops being distracted by big screen TVs, YouTube and NASCAR, perhaps humankind will discover (or rediscover) a connection to the unknown parts of ourselves that can commune with the universe in ways we can only begin to imagine in our present state. In any case, powers such as those of Brother Jobe or The Witch of Hebron allow amazing transformations to happen, not only for Jasper, but for others in need of change (Jasper), or help (the Reverend Loren Holder), or revelation (Jasper’s father, the town doctor). More than once, Kunstler’s skill at depicting the joy of life, or discovery, or change, arrested my senses with a sympathetic appreciation for what his characters are able to learn and achieve, and with a renewed appreciation for the skill with which the author composes his prose.

Ultimately, whether our world goes precisely the way Kunstler expects (in both his fiction and non-fiction) is yet to be known. But the world the author creates, burned-out big box stores, torn-up pavement and all, is one worth exploring, and one that celebrates a very real human spirit that could still be burning within us all. If only we’d shut off the big-screen TVs, let go of the illusions and distractions that blind us to the true nature of our world now and in the very near future, and take the time to focus on what is real and what is true. There is kindness and great potential at the heart of nearly every soul, Kunstler seems to say, but we have buried them under so many Bloomin’ Onions and old car tires that we have all but forgotten what it is to truly be alive. Let The Witch of Hebron remind you.

James Howard Kunstler’s The Witch of Hebron will be released in September, 2010 by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Click over to Trouble with Comics to check out my review of the new Dan Clowes graphic novel Wilson. And check out Chris Allen’s piece on Wilson, while you’re there!