Jacobs was nearly 75 when she began Systems of Survival. The immense success of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was well in the past; so were the frustrations of her more analytical The Economy of Cities (1969) and the disappointment at the reception of Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). She had nothing more to prove, so she wrote Systems in a manner that was more congenial to her — as a dialogue among half a dozen friends from different walks of life who meet on fourteen occasions to discuss various threats to the prevailing “great web of trust in the honesty of business.” It contains some of her most original and provocative thinking. But Systems is not easy to digest, and the book has not yet gained the audience it deserves.You can also find this format in much earlier writing: Galileo and Fontenelle are two I've read and liked (though not in their online forms; I read Stillman Drake's Galileo translations and H.A. Hargreaves' version of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds).
“This is no novel,” says the fictional Armbruster near the beginning. He is a publisher who convenes the sessions. “This is a tradition older than the novel. Dialogue – didactic talking heads, if you will – goes back to Plato and possibly to the dawn of consciousness about right and wrong, whatever that was. The form – disagreements, speculations, second thoughts, questions, answers, amended answers – it’s suited to the problematic subject matter. Let’s give it a try? What harm can it do?”
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:09 PM on November 1, 2012 [4 favorites]