The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

By James Howard Kunstler

This is an excellent book that crisply describes a future without oil. (Hint: it isn’t pretty). I liked it because Mr. Kunstler does such a good job of leaving no refuge for those who would want to hope that somehow we’ll be able to “preserve our easy motoring utopia.” We won’t. Rather, we’ll just have to figure out how to get around with less oil, and that’s a situation for which vast swaths of our country are thoroughly unprepared. The ‘vast swath’ being the whole thing, pretty much. A bit of a dystopian view of the future, but one that the architectural critic Kunstler views positively, since it will unwind the dreaded strip malls and failed exurb experiment.