I was going to order this anyway, but Ben’s note makes it a must.
Alright, so it’s a descent into schilling, but there can be no more exciting news to greet a sunny Monday morning than that of a new book by Jane Jacobs.
Not content with blowing out the back of my intellectual skull with the Death and Life of Great American Cities, she goes and writes another that sounds right down my trousers: Dark Age Ahead. Here’s the blurb:
In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference — from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario — and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.
Hmm, contrast that with this in yesterday’s local paper:
The Seattle Times: Books: ‘Dark Age Ahead’: End of the road for a civilization of drivers?:
There are other good points in this short and snappy book and much spirit from a still-lively mind. But if Jacobs wanted to write about cars, which she clearly did, she should have done it openly and not disguised it as a book about the eclipse of civilization.
The book isn’t about cars, from what I can gather, but it appears the reviewer is unable to work that out. Without having read it, I can’t refute the charges, but from the blurb, it’s hard to see how the reviewer saw this as a book about cars. The snarky aside where the reviewer reveals he never knew about the auto cartel’s destruction of many cities public transportation systems[1] makes me wonder why he was given this book to review at all. (see also this page.)
fn1. In the 1930s and 1940s, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company conspired with Standard Oil of California and General Motors to replace highly-efficient urban electric transit systems with bus operations using petroleum. They formed National City Lines, which by the mid-1950s had completed the motorization of electric transit systems in sixteen states. This included the destruction of the Pacific Electric System in Southern California, which operated 3,000 trains through 56 cities and carried 80 million passengers annually. General Motors was convicted of conspiracy in 1949 and fined $5,000.