Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bless Jane Jacobs. Lively, lucid, blunt, original, she triumphs by being mostly wrong. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), took thousands of great-American-city dwellers by storm. Written in the heyday of urban renewal, it briskly pointed out that most big, supposedly progressive rebuilding projects were casting a "great blight of dullness" on the already tormented city dweller. In her ten years as an editor of Architectural Forum, she had seen plenty of such projects. The zesty future, she argued, could be found instead by returning to the diversity of the past...
Despite such simplistic assumptions, Jane Jacobs succeeds as usual. Shining through every page of her book is a boundless and infectious conviction that the city is the best and noblest product of man. In one remarkable chapter she even goes so far as to reverse the traditional assumption that the first cities grew out of agricultural communities. Not at all. Citing archaeological evidence, Jane Jacobs argues that the first cities were founded on trade and actually helped create organized agriculture and animal husbandry. In an age when most Americans have been persuaded that great cities are creeping problem areas...
...successful playwright as passionately as some men long to climb Everest. Guy Domville's failure caused him very nearly to break down as a man, but it left him functioning as a writer. Or so Leon Edel asserts in this, the fourth volume of his projected five-book biography. James spent the next years writing himself out of shock-applying what Edel calls "imaginative self-therapy." Recounting a transitional period in James' creative life, Professor Edel has more recourse than necessary to Freud, but his book is otherwise as graceful and precise as the previous volumes...
...Woman in the Dunes was such a book. Kobo Abé, one of Japan's most important writers, took an absurdist nightmare-the tale of a man's adjustment to life in an escapeless pit-and gave it both mythic reality and a moral power. Abé's The Face of Another, a novel about a chemist with a burnt-out face who attempts to function behind a life mask he has fashioned for himself, is as direct as any contemporary exploration of the identity-crisis theme. The Ruined Map, his newest novel to be translated into...
...straight mystery the book will probably disappoint most Western readers. Wispy implications substitute for concrete clues. The end is not solution but dissolution. Yet the hand of a novelist of quality is omnipresent. The book is not unlike a Greene entertainment or a serious Simenon; one never feels too far removed from the chill that comes from brushing up against the raincoat tails of true mystery-the real nature of human experience...