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Archive for July, 2010
Genius of Common Sense + Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad
Genius of Common Sense
Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch
Boston: David R. Godine, 2009, 128 pages
Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad
Frances Moore Lappé
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Small Planet Media, 2007, 208 pages
How do you change the world? Where do you start, locally or globally? For inspiration and a way out of the paralysis that stymies so many of us, two remarkable women – Jane Jacobs and Frances Moore Lappé – offer some practical ideas.
Jacobs, the late, great thinker, activist and author, is the subject of a new book written for people aged “10 to 100.” It is the story of how Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, came to be written, and what shaped and influenced her life.
Younger readers will enjoy meeting Jacobs as an inquisitive, fearless child who never lost her propensity to think independently until the day she died in 2006, just a week shy of turning 90. The book’s title, Genius of Common Sense, is not hyperbole. Jacobs’ observations about what makes cities livable ran counter to urban theorists in New York City, where she lived at the time. Lacking a university degree, she wasn’t taken seriously until she began writing articles and making her voice heard in neighbourhood protests.
Augmented with photographs and pencil illustrations, Genius of Common Sense chronicles Jacobs’ life [Click here to read more!]
The War in the Country: How the Fight to Save Rural Life Will Shape Our Future
The War in the Country: How the Fight to Save Rural Life Will Shape Our Future
Thomas E. Pawlick
Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009, 320 pages.
In The War in the Country, Thomas Pawlick has done a great service. He documents recent tensions and traumas that have battered every rural community across Ontario. Moreover, he reports in the voice of family farmers, small businesses, native people and back-to-the-landers. These stories are worth keeping in your library to be read from time to time – to be reminded of the countryside that once existed.
Economies of scale sent farmers away from local, independent suppliers to better deals in regional supply centres. Larger livestock barns led to demands that municipalities and provincial regulators set standards for [Click here to read more!]
Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?
Kate Bingaman-Burt
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010
You don’t often come across a book of innocent-looking doodles that has the power to make you reflect on the deeper meaning of life. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Obsessive Consumption does just that.
An assistant professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University, Burt documents her daily purchases of mundane everyday objects through a series of sketches. Depicting everything from credit-card statements to wedding bands, the endearingly cartoonish drawings are painfully honest and … [Click here to read more!]
Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change
Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009, 166 pages.
Yogi Berra’s famous line, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” certainly rings true for decision makers and citizens concerned with the well-being of urban areas.
Resilient Cities, written by sustainability researchers Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer, describes a future in which peak oil and climate change will mean the end of many familiar signs of affluence. We will have to give up urban sprawl, transportation systems organized around personal motor vehicles, our dependence on global trade (especially in food) and, more generally, our ability … [Click here to read more!]
