Half-Page Books: Jane Jacob's classic
Jacobs' 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' made her a superstar. It will be read forever -- and no doubt ignored by many urban planners whose bad ideas she exposed.
One weekend a month in the mid-2000s I put together a books page for the Pittsburgh Trib’s Sunday Opinion section. First it was half a page, then a full page. It was a place to review new political books, reprint old reviews of classic books, interview authors, pull quotes from old and new books and do mini-reviews of books.
Jane’s Classic
April 30, 2006
Few great books of the last century retain the power and influence of Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
More than a readable ode to the socioeconomic workings of the cities Jacobs loved, it was a brave assault on the urban planning establishment whose ideas, federal money and bulldozers were destroying old neighborhoods and downtowns in cities like Pittsburgh across America in the late 1950s.
Jacobs, who died in her adopted Toronto last week at age 89, showed how cities behave like living, messy organisms and need economic, architectural and human diversity and high population densities to thrive. As she later described it, her book was essentially a study of the human ecology of cities.
Jacobs, who did some of her research for "Death and Life" in Pittsburgh, favored and understood the benefits of free markets and opposed public and private monopolies, zoning ordinances and top-down urban renewal projects of the kind that brought us the Lower Hill and East Liberty.
"Death and Life" made Jacobs a superstar -- probably forever. Important and controversial when published, it's become a textbook in universities and has been hailed as probably the single most influential American book on urban planning.
The book's disparate fans describe it, variously but accurately, as literature, great journalism, economics, and sidewalk-and-storefront sociology. But the urban planning establishment of the day and its political allies trashed her ideas and her lack of credentials.
In reviews, the great city guru Lewis Mumford took to the pages of the New Yorker to ridicule her as a "Mother Jacobs" who was "offering homemade poultice for the cure of cancer." But Fortune magazine editor William H. Whyte hailed it as "a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city."
Despite the continuing popularity of her book, Jacobs' intellectual victory is not complete in the real world.
As she wrote in a foreword to the 1993 edition of "Death and Life," "Anti-city planning remains amazingly sturdy in American cities. It is still embodied in thousands of regulations, bylaws, and codes, also in bureaucratic timidities owing to accepted practices, and in unexamined public attitudes hardened by time."
Jacobs also said in 1993 she'd love to be able to take credit for ending America's plague of urban-renewal and slum-clearing programs. But it just wasn't true, she said, as proposed Downtown redevelopment schemes in cities like Pittsburgh would soon prove.
My long interview with Jacobs is here.
BOX OF BOOKS
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy” by Francis Fukuyama (Yale)
National Review's reviewer called neoconservative intellectual Fukuyama “one of America's foremost thinkers.” The New York Times said he has “surely been the most imaginative … and the most ambitious” of the neocons. In 2002 Fukuyama resigned from the neoconservative brain trust that's been directing the Bush administration's democracy-building foreign policy because he did not support the war in Iraq. Neither NR nor the NYT are too fond of professor Fukuyama's complex, changing and multi-nuanced ideas about the proper shape and aims of American foreign policy in a post-Iraq war world. But as the Times' reviewer says, Fukuyama “is always worth reading.''
“In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State” by Charles Murray (AEI)
The deep-thinking libertarian author of “Losing Ground” gets serious about his late 1980s dream of abolishing the welfare state's costly, often harmful social programs. Murray proposes replacing every transfer payment from Social Security and student loans to welfare with a monthly government check that would place cold cash into every 21-year-old's bank account. Everyone under $25,000 gets $10,000 a year, but even the rich get $5,000. The costs would be much higher than current spending at first, though they'd be lower by 2012 and beyond, he claims. Meanwhile, the social benefits -- erasing the working poor, reducing bureaucrats, eliminating the infrastructure of the welfare state -- would be large and lasting.
“Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives” by Juliet Eilperin (Rowman & Littlefield)
Reform and renewed responsiveness toward voters were supposed to follow when Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994 after 40 years of Democrat hegemony. But those ideals never fully materialized and have been trumped by partisanship and polarization, says Eilperin, a Washington Post environmental writer and frequent media fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank. Eilperin says redistricting is the culprit: By drawing up lopsided districts that make it virtually impossible for incumbent R's or D's to lose their seats, she says extremist lawmakers in both parties can ignore average voters.
“Thank You for Smoking: A Novel” by Christopher Buckley (Random House Trade Paperbacks)
You've seen the critically praised movie, so why not read Buckley's “savagely funny satirical farce” (New York Times) from 1994 about Washington politics, corporate lobbyists, Hollywood greed and multimedia sleaze? As “American as pork barrels and public relations” (The Atlanta Journal & Constitution), Bill Buckley's politically incorrect son sides with Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and the firearms industry in his “playful assault on American moral hypocrisy” (Kirkus Review).
Laura Bush : An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady By Ronald Kessler (Doubleday)
Publisher's Weekly sniffs that this "inoffensive biography examines Laura Bush without ever quite explaining her" and is annoyed by the many unfavorable comparisons between Mrs. Bush and the first lady who preceded her. But Ronald Kessler dug up some interesting but uncontroversial facts about Laura Bush's "secret," albeit normal, life and modest, self-assured character. According to Kessler, a former investigative reporter whose 15 books include "Inside the CIA," the Bush administration regularly asks Laura for advice on appointments and policy issues. Because of her, he says, some agency budgets have been increased or not cut.
Half-page books, written and compiled by Bill Steigerwald, appears on the last Sunday of each month.