So long, civilization
Jane Jacobs looks at what modern life has done to cities, farms and economies, and she doesn't like what she sees

Dark Age Ahead By Jane Jacobs There's no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs, nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us. So it's heartening that even in her late 80s, in a book whose title hints at common sense giving way to broad-brush gloom, she studies the economy by lifting up a chair. "Turning a chair upside down for a clue to its provenance, I found a label reporting 'Made in Canada,' " Jacobs writes of a visit to a Toronto suburb where jobs are increasing even though conventional economic wisdom says they shouldn't. "A prowl among offices in industrial parks might suggest further grist for import replacing and innovation." That sort of dogma-free inquisitiveness sharpens everything that Jacobs has written since 1961's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." In her new book, "Dark Age Ahead," Jacobs visits her old thematic haunts -- the way cities work, the way economies work, the shakiness of too much "accepted" wisdom -- to bring back an ominous new message: Lazy thinking and a lack of accountability could combine to unhinge many of the advances that fuel our modern life.

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  thanks to reenhead

I first read Jane Jacobs 40 years ago. I've read her books since. She always makes me think. If anyone would like me to think some more you could go to my wish list and buy it for me. Or, if you are the the mood for some thinking yourself, you could get a copy at your favorite bookstore or here: