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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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