How did one week go by?

OK, let's see -- it has been quite a week in my world and while reading is happening thinking much beyond the reading I have been doing for my class is not happening (that is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite books, ever).  But I also finished the truly dreadful Witch of Hebron by James Kunstler and am dipping in and out of the T.C. Boyle short story collection Wild Child (bought for the title story, which was disappointing -- on the other hand the stroy "1300 rats" was pretty much just what you would want out of a story with that title).  So, Kunstler.  He is the author of the beautifully titled World Made by Hand.  Can a book be good if the only good thing about it is the title?  (More below on the title.)  Kunstler (peak oil man of The Long Emergency, nonfiction),  imagines life post oil, post nameless war and post various diseases, in a small town along the Hudson river north of Albany, NY.  Without oil, gasoline, electricity, communications systems and essentially every other means of modern comfort (which seems to include egalitarian gender relations) the people of Union Grove face many difficulties: the crazed and violent gang of thugs that scavenge, fail to apprecaite hard work, but allow Kunstler to offer up some pretty disgusting punishments; the disappearance of some men who went to trade in Albany; and the arrival of a quasi cult like christian group that has been moving north after facing worse difficulties in the southeastern US.  Oh I can't even go on with its silly plot.  So the Witch of Hebron continues the celebration of the simple life, of men who fish and hunt and treat their women well and women who...well, other than the witch, women who pretty much stay off the page unles their buxom boutnies are being discussed.  Kunstler, I suspect, fanstasizes of being a medieval lord -- and it is as tiresome as it sounds.

But the title -- he captures simply in a title the important feature of life post-apocalypse: that it (like life post state of nature) must be made by hand -- not because we eat slow and love our goods handmade -- but because we understand that politics, organized living together, can only be made 'by hand.'  Not by god, not by superiors, but by us.  Sadly he has ruined a perfectly good title with two novels of nonsense.