Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs by Robert Kanigel

JANE JACOBS’S STREET SMARTS.

What the urbanist and writer got so right about cities—and what she got wrong.
By Adam Gopnik

“Jacobs, in 1969: an ordinary mom who set out to protect the neighborhood. I got to talk to Jane Jacobs once, toward the end of her life, an interview that is mentioned, in its properly Lilliputian proportion, in Robert Kanigel’s new biography, “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs” (Knopf). She was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them, the others being Iona Opie, the British folklorist who collected children’s rhymes, and I. F. Stone, the independent American…”