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Biography
James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of
Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my
feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips,
parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities,
and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday
environment where most Americans live and work."
Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion
with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it
appeared as the cover story in the September 1996
Atlantic Monthly.
His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on
the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster /
Free Press, is a look a wide-ranging look at cities here
and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or
miserable), and in particular what America is going to
do with it's mutilated cities.
His latest book, The Long Emergency, published by the
Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges
posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate
change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st
Century."
The Atlantic Monthly Press also published his novel,
Maggie Darling, in 2004.
Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels
including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches.
He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday
Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on
environmental and economic issues.
Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved
to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the
city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He
graduated from the State Univerity of New York,
Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he
dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has
no formal training in architecture or the related design
fields.
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth,
Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many
other colleges, and he has appeared before many
professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA.,
and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York |
