Rating: 
Summary: Let's All Hope Jane Is Wrong This Time
Review: 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; nothing I read changed my limited acumen, and I'll re-read the book because I think it's that good. Whether you agree with her or not, Jacobs is well worth reading. But I really, sincerely, fervently, passionately, hope she's wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: A brief, but thorough outline of the author's view of the direction that Western Civilization (American in particular) appears to be headed. However, unlike what the editorial reviews would've had me believe, I did not find very much optimism contained within. In fact, I found it rather depressing. The book spends six chapters outlining the problems and their "proofs" and a single thin chapter on what to do about it. I suspect that like most poli-sci-economic-stuff that is found in "normal" bookstores, the intended audience is armchair philosophers, pundits, and anyone who can read that happens to reside in N. America or Western Europe (of which I must be one, as I've bothered to write this silly review). If so, then this book delivers, and in the best way possible. Five "pillars of [Western] culture" are identified:
* Community and family
* Higher education
* Effective practice of science
* Taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
* Self-policing by learned professions Each has a chapter devoted to explaining how it is under assault. This may sound dry, but the author's style is conversational and the medicine goes down easy. Each chapter is a comfortable, rambling, casually meandering journey to the point. And along the way it forces one to think critically. (Perhaps Jane Jacobs is the Mary Poppins of economics. Anyhow...) The book was insightful and inspirational. By the time I was finished, I'd written a ton of questions and notes for further exploration. Perhaps this is the optimistic quality mentioned by other reviewers. Unfortunately, I wan't impressed with the final chapter, "Unwinding vicious spirals". It just isn't enough. As is typical, it is easy to point out problems, but difficult to provide solutions. Then again, perhaps it would be a waste of time to try to provide a one-size-fits-all solution as each situation is different and requires local resources to be freed to step-up and solve the problem for themselves. Reading the book will help clarify that last statement. Hopefully, the solution defficiency will help inspire the smarter people of my generation to arrive at solutions that expand upon the core of the ideas presented in the chapter. I'm deffinately not one of those, but at least it inspired me to look into many of the ideas and perhaps contribute some small thing. Highly recommended, if only to impress your friends around the watercooler with concepts such as "import replacement" and "jitneys vs. tradtional mass transit". (It'll also make you cooler, and better looking!)
Rating: 
Summary: Intersting Premise, But Poor Design and Execution
Review: Does Jane Jacobs really think that we are facing a breakdown in society like unto that described in her first chapter? People starving on the highways, a breakdown in social cohesion, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria? It is hard to tell from the rest of her book. Ultimately, it seems the coming "dark age" described by Jacobs is in reality more of a "period of rolling blackouts."
She identifies five "pillars of society" that she sees as showing signs of cultural decay, but fails to adequately explain why the failure of those five pillars leads to the Dark Ages, or define those five clearly, or present more than anecdotal support for her views of their decay. If she truly sees a breakdown in society profound enough to be called a "Dark Age," she fails to explain the nature of the threat with any clarity (unless poor traffic management is the hitherto unknown Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse). Jacobs further fails, except in very limited fashion, to even address contrary views of society's progression.
Ultimately, this is a longish essay masquerading as a profound book, a tract instead of a treatise. It is sloppily organized, poorly expounded, and the supporting notes are underwhelming. Yet I would not have picked up this book if I were not concerned that there is a chance we are on the brink of a collapse, or at least a great change in Western Civilization. If my own fears are any indicator, there is a serious study to be made of the decay of our society, and the potential dangers we face. If this book was supposed to be taken as a serious review of this possibility, it should have been better devised and its arguments better supported. As it is, I am oddly comforted by this book's failure to convince me.
Rating:
Summary: Reassessing the way you live
Review: I couldnt put this book down - Not because it was good or anything, but because I kept expecting it to get better. While I do share a lot of Ms. Jacob's fears, I can't help but feel that buying this book was a big waste of my money, and reading it was an even bigger waste of my time.
Jacobs starts the book off rather painfully. The first chapter was frustrating, repetitious, and pointless. I turned each page eagerly hoping the chapter would end. Luckily the first few pages are the lowest point in a fairly short book. The rest reads pretty smoothly, but offers little in the way of substance. There were very little facts or statistics presented, it was almost entirely nothing but baseless opinions. She spends page after page making an accusation/assertion - only to follow it up with a bare bones explanation. Often she doesnt even bother to explain herself at all. And as mentioned, the book lacks organization. She jumps around from topic to topic, loses focus, etc. The liberal propaganda was the final straw for me.
I feel guilty for even writing this, but at times it was hard to keep from dismissing her as a cranky old lady. Deep down she has a good message, but this book will do little in the way of saving our cities.
Rating:
Summary: another review of the reviews
Review: I have read this book.
I agree with Brian Harmon and would describe this book as "skeletal." I disagree with John Ebert's long review. I think he understood the book on a level lower than for which the book was intended; Jacobs' argument is more nuanced than John describes in his review. For example, Jacobs' discussion of cars and highways are used only as examples among many to draw the outline of an overarching societal trend. Most people, like John, apparently fail to connect the dots themselves, which is ironic because Jacobs also discusses the softening of our educational system.
In short, Jacobs needs to flush out her argument if she wishes to connect with those who need more educational background to grok what she has to say.
Rating:
Summary: Starts out pretty good
Review: I have two books by this lady.
She tends to be pretty dry, but has a good wit.
She just isn't up on how history progresses and cycles.
She gets the idea that we are running out of gas...
But has no real idea or the root causes as far as I can see.
She tends to repeat the same stuff over and over and
seems hard put to get to the point of why we are headed for a dark age!
The major point she misses is that this is part of an overall pattern
of more than economic and social variables.
I think, it is a good thing that a recognized writer is writing this,
but I would be more encouraged if she had an idea of the mathematical models of traffic flow
now being used in mathematics.
If she had an idea that mathematics for a lot of this actually existed...
She's a typewriter pounding news writer...
one can't expect genius to rise above it's origin?
Read the book because she is right in the first couple of chapters and
actually understands some of Jared Diamond's arguments.
Rating: 
Summary: ethnocentric rubbish reflects concerns of privledged few
Review: I read this book for my book club otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I scanned the text until somewhere near the end where she says something like - western culture is the greatest society and we should do everything in our power to preserve it. Wait a minute. Here in the privledged West we have far to much free time to spend debating or worrying about traffic problems in Toronto, how our taxes are spent or about any one of her five pillars of society which are suffering decline and are thus the reason for her title.
I bet Jane Jacobs has never been to the third world, seen beggars sitting in their allotted square foot of pavement in Delhi or whole families in Kashmir squatted in front of a carpet, weaving colored wool through the weft to make enough money for things that really matter like food and shelter.
I bet if Jane jacobs has ever been to a country less privledged than where she currently resides in Canada, she did so from the comfort of a satin lined chair replete with gold cord, threaded with diamonds in the lofty towers of a luxury hotel .
Rating:
Summary: Skeletal
Review: Jane Jacobs claims that an argument can be made that we reside on the precipice of a new dark age. She provides a very useful outline upon which such an argument could be structured. But she does not make the argument herself. It seems like Ms. Jacobs is using this book to plant the seeds of an idea that she hopes others will step up to germinate and grow. If you are at all skeptical about its premise, this book probably won't do anything for you. The arguments will seem scattered, and the examples will seem superficial at best and irrelevant at worst. But if you are at all open to the dark age notion, or think it is feasible (as I have for a number of years),then the book may be a nice aid in helping you to organize your reading and thinking to better build a case for this haunting premise. Hopefully, some of the rest of us will pick up Jacobs' notion and give it the full treatment it deserves...
Rating:
Summary: The Automobile as the Cause of a new Dark Age!?
Review: Jane Jacobs' new book, Dark Age Ahead, is an apparent meditation on the coming collapse of our civilization, unless, Ms. Jacobs insists, certain conditions are met in order to forestall this. She examines breakdowns in five areas of our society which she says are grounds for alarm that things are not well: family, education, science, taxes and self-policing by the learned professions. After a brief introduction which examines Jared Diamond's thesis that societies which succeed over those which lose, do so for reasons which have nothing to do with the innate superiority of one people over another, but rather due to favorable environmental conditions, Ms. Jacobs moves on to the first of her pillars, family.
Here, the reader is surprised to learn that the reason why families have broken down, with soaring divorce rates, etc., is because of the rise of the automobile. The building of highways and freeways, Ms. Jacobs argues, destroys communities, turns cities into suburban waste lands in which no one walks anywhere and consequently, no one speaks to anyone, or knows anyone else. While Ms. Jacobs may certainly have a point here about highways and the destruction of communities, one wonders about the logic of her judgment that such highways are the cause of the decline of the family. Surely there are other factors involved in the decline of the family than automobiles? Surely, things like drug abuse, alcoholism, poor education, and an overvaluation of the the youth and their indepedence are involved also? But these things, you see, are irrelevant to Ms. Jacobs's diatribe against the automobile industry. For, as far as she is concerned, automobiles are the root cause of all evil in American society, and so they must go.
Then, Ms. Jacobs continues with an analysis of education, insisting, rightly, that education has declined to a matter of credentialing rather than educating. Universities have become degree mills whose main purpose is to stimulate the economy by making more jobs available. True enough. But then, in comes the automobile industry once again, for Ms. Jacobs insists that ever since the 1950's, jobs have been guaranteed with the building of highways, roads and servicing and manufacturing automobiles with the emergence of the Interstate Highway System. Once again, somehow Ms. Jacobs twists things around, so that the decline of education is linked with the rise of the automobile industry. Hmm.
Perhaps we will find a different point of view in the next chapter, the reader wonders, a chapter on how science has gone wrong. But no, here too, the automobile industry emerges as one of the primary problems. Ms. Jacobs cites an example of a heatwave epidemic that killed off many of the elderly in Chicago in 1995. The CDC's study of the causes were bad science, she says, because they asked the wrong questions. By comparing one elderly survivor of the heatwave with one who perished, the CDC arrived at the well-known cause that those who survived did so because they had access to air-conditioning, and plenty of water, whereas those who didn't survive, did not have access to these things. But Ms. Jacob's points out that the study asked the wrong questions, for in a subsequent study, it turns out that those who lived in North Lawndale, where the majority of the elderly perished, lived in areas which had become decentralized through the building of highways, so that the elderly had no friendly stores to go to in order to stay cool, knew nobody to ask for help, and generally just did not have a community to help support them in their distress, while in South Lawndale, where the majority survived, did so because the building of highways had not ruined their community and the elderly had access to a good social support system. Though Ms. Jacobs may be right about this particular case, it is wrong to hold it up as an example of how the theoretical edifice of "science" is falling apart, for this is a problem of social science, not high theoretical science. Indeed, it is even debatable whether social science can be considered a 'science' at all.
According to Ms. Jacobs, we are in for a Dark Age because of the existence of automobiles and the automobile industry. Surely, this is one of the worst analyses of the causes of cultural senescence ever written. That such an incredibly simplistic and mind-numbingly facile analysis is passed off as cultural criticism simply boggles the mind. This is the kind of garbage that the literary Establishment at places like the New York Review of Books would have us believe represents valid cultural discourse. Ms. Jacobs, it would appear, has an axe to grind, and in order to sell books, she has disguised her diatribe against the automobile industry as a theoretical book of a different kind altogether, one that would merit a title such as Dark Age Ahead. Maybe Ms Jacobs, at the end of her career, has been pissed off at the automobile industry for so long, that she can think of nothing else, and when it comes to writing a general work of culture theory on a larger issue that affects us all, her mind has become so warped by the single-minded pursuit of her cause, that no fact, theory or analysis can appear on the page in front of her without it being twisted into her personal, subjective animosity. Thanks, Ms. Jacobs, for the bait and switch.
--John David Ebert
Rating: 
Summary: Review of the reviews
Review: LOL - I thought this discussion was to review the book. perhaps if we did not have automobiles to escape the crowded city, we would wind up killing each other. I give 5 starts to john david ebert.
for the book. well, i haven't read it. yet.
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