Dark Age Ahead

As in her first book Ms. Jacobs is able to see clearly and write lucidly of things to come. A keen observer that can learn and communicate what she sees. It took too many years for The Death and Life of Great American Cities for planners to recognize the wisdom of her observations. History has now witnessed the disaster she saw before it was too late. She seems to pre-date Naomi Klein and The Shock Doctrine but her message is just as clear. A must read, as are all her works!

jane jacobs has always proven herself to be a highly insightful and prescient author, and this book is no exception to this rule. while i have to concede that this is not her best or most well edited read, i think it reads and must be viewed as a beginning outline sketch of her perceptions of our culture's coming crises. it carries the strong feel, throughout, that she was attempting to put forth her still-forming ideas while she still was able--she herself admits, as asides or casual comments in the work itself, that her health was failing considerably. this work is still, as ever, a poignant collection of insights by one of the most qualified, intelligent, and experienced observers of urban environments our society has ever had the pleasure to include. read it as it seems to have been intended--as an urgent warning and series of instructions for further investigation by her successors.

In her customary clear-headed fashion Jane Jacobs has written a brief but brilliant summary of the reasons why Western culture is facing a Dark Age. In short chapters (supplemented by copious notes and further details at the end) she examines the decline of the family structure, the breakdown of community, the discarding of education in favor of "credentialing", and other warning signs of decline. Jacobs is always clear minded and often witty. She makes the same point again and again: decline is not so much a failure of society or of structure as it is of imagination, our inability or unwillingness to look beyond the immediate problem or to consider unusual but promising alternatives. Sometimes the solution is so obvious as to be overlooked, such as that the reason for a high death toll among the elderly in one Chicago neighborhood during a heat wave was not neglect or failure to provide information, but rather that there was no viable community to give the support and help that was needed. Jacobs will not please those who have permanently bound themselves to either the Left or Right, but those of us able to look beyond ideology in search of real solutions will find much to ponder here.

Once again, with all of her usual brilliance, insight, logic and wisdom, Jacobs has produced a fascinating book; unfortunately, her talents in analyzing city life is a slender reed upon which she trys to support her indictment of modern society. Canada may well be in as dramatic a decline as she asserts; by all indications, the country has been slipping slowly since the departure of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1993. However, the decline and fall of Canada is not necessarily the pattern for the decline and fall of civilisation -- regardless of the level of civilisation in Canada. Canada has had a de facto one-party rule since the 1930s, and like Cuba, North Korea and Haiti, the domination by one political party or one economic class does not produce continuing prosperity. Jacobs states "a large part of the country is economically stagnant or declining" in describing Canada, then lapses into the Oswald Spengler syndrome. Spengler, the German historian whose faith in his homeland was shattered by its World War I defeat, based his book "The Decline of the West" on that collapse. Since Canada has no military to speak of, she blames a cabal of unnamed neoconservatives, similar to the right-wing pseudo-intellectuals in the White House who are blamed for every stupid mistake made by George Bush (as if he wasn't dumb enough to make his own mistakes every now and then). Her book is greatly weakened by her inability, and she hints the inability of anyone in Canada, to know how the heavy taxes collected by the federal government are spent. She is definitely right that Canada is declining; for example, Statistics Canada reports a crime rate of 9,907 offenses per 100,000 people in 1990; this compares to a crime rate of 5,900 in the US. She writes of Toronto, Canada's richest city, where she lives, as having "a disquieting surliness or public sullenness; impatience, impoliteness, rage. These are more subtle signs that Toronto has become a city in crisis, indeed in multiple crises." It's a sorry decline since I lived there in the 1960s. If Canada is the miner's canary of the civilized world, then we're all in deep trouble. But what of Britain? When British Rail grew tired of constant breakdowns of its aging diesel locomotives, they bought new ones made in London, Ontario (in a US branch plant). On any given day, one quarter of British-built locomotives are out of service; compared to only 5 percent of the Canadian locomotives. Somebody in Canada must be doing something right. Jacobs seems intent on finding bad examples, and there are plenty in any society. She's one of the most astute observers of the human condition, so this may not be merely senior citizen grumpiness. In this case, to misquote a famed Dorothy Parker review, "This book should not be set aside lightly, it should be considered with great force." Personally, I think she's dead wrong. I considered her basic premise wrong before I began reading the book; no

Okay, so are there any reviewers out there willing to help the rest of us with this book besides the hard-core whiners below?