- Jacobs, Jane. Dark Age Ahead. New York:
Random House, 2004. ISBN 1-4000-6232-2.
- The reaction of a reader who chooses this book solely
based on its title or the dust-jacket blurb is quite likely to be,
“Huh?” The first chapter vividly evokes the squalor and mass
cultural amnesia which followed the fall of Western Rome, the
collapse of the Chinese global exploration and trade in the Ming
dynasty, and the extinction of indigenous cultures in North America
and elsewhere. Then, suddenly, we find ourselves talking about
urban traffic planning, the merits of trolley buses vs. light rail
systems, Toronto metropolitan government, accounting scandals, revenue
sharing with municipalities, and a host of other issues which, however
important, few would rank as high on the list of probable causes of
an incipient dark age. These are issues near and dear to the author,
who has been writing about them ever since her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American
Cities (Jacobs was born in 1916 and wrote this book at the
age of 87). If you're unfamiliar with her earlier work, the extensive
discussion of “city import replacement” in the present volume will go
right over your head as she never defines it here. Further, she uses
the word “neoconservative” at variance with its usual meaning in the
U.S. and Europe. It's only on page 113 (of 175 pages of main text)
that we discover this is a uniquely Canadian definition. Fine, she's
been a resident of Toronto since 1969, but this book is published in
New York and addressed to an audience of “North Americans” (another
Canadian usage), so it's unnecessarily confusing. I find little
in this book to disagree with, but as a discussion of the genuine
risks which face Western civilisation, it's superficial and largely
irrelevant.
October 2004 