AN INDEPENDENT MIND

Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("If this book aims to highlight any subject outside that of Jane Jacobs herself, it is that of the independent mind in conflict with received wisdom." Id. at 13. "A charge sometimes laid against her was that, middle-class to her toes, she didn't acutely feel the weight of injustice that bore down on so many. 'She was blind to issues of class and race,' says Herbert Gans. Jane did have populist leanings. She mistrusted the airy pronouncements of the powerful. 'If planning is good for human beings,' she said in 1962, 'it shouldn't keep hurting them in the concrete and helping them in the abstract.' She felt wisdom flowed up as often as down, from the many as reliably as from the few. She understood that may people didn't get a fair deal. She asserted true, right, and good things: 'Any child is more important than any idea.' She was good, thoroughly decent. Bigness riled her. So did brute authority, stupidity exerted by the world's bullies and simpletons. Still, her empathy for the unlucky and oppressed was probably not as urgent as to is among some; she's been too lucky, too favored by fortune and circumstances." Id. at 396.).