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
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
IN THE NEWS
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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