A timely volume that supports Jacobs’ aim to “stir up some independent thinking urgently needed as a wake-up call for...
A collection of short pieces by an outspoken champion of urban diversity.
To commemorate the centenary of the birth of Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), urban historian Zipp (American Studies/Brown Univ.; Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, 2012) and curator and designer Storring have gathered 37 articles, essays, talks, and interviews that span Jacobs’ career as an astute, opinionated commentator on city life. Their informative introduction to the volume and to each of the sections provides an illuminating context for the arc of Jacobs’ career and the issues faced by her native and adopted cities, New York and Toronto. Jacobs “delighted in irking all the specialists and ideologues, from planners and sociologists to libertarians and Marxists.” After working as a freelance journalist, she started at Architectural Forum, where she later wrote about urban renewal projects. That experience fed into her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which elevated her to prominence as an urban critic. The well-chosen selection begins in 1935 and 1937, with two articles for Vogue, each offering a lively, affectionate portrait of the diamond district and wholesale flower markets. Jacobs’ essays for Forum, beginning in the 1950s, reflect her growing awareness of the consequences of renewal and gentrification and her sophisticated take on building structure, much of which she learned from her husband, an architect. For Jacobs, the city’s life was in its streets: stores, she said, “are social centers,” and the diversity of “30 neighborhood delicatessens, fruit stands, groceries and butchers” cannot be replaced by one supermarket. Redevelopment that does not account for the richness of neighborhood life “causes catastrophic dislocation and hardship.” She scorned “spacious, parklike, and uncrowded” revitalization projects that would leave a downtown looking like “a well-kept, dignified cemetery.”
A timely volume that supports Jacobs’ aim to “stir up some independent thinking urgently needed as a wake-up call for America.” A perfect complement to Robert Kanigel’s excellent biography, Eyes on the Street (2016).Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-58960-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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