Jane Jacobs’ writing style can be cutting and caustic. She has no need for sarcasm, though she does venture into the hyperbole at times (see “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities). You could say that when she does, her subject deserves it.

Jacobs is matter-of-fact. She’ll unpack a complex idea or observation, then, buried in the middle of a paragraph you can find a simple sentence, pithy little gem:

Unity, like many good things, is good only in moderation. “The Hazard,” Dark Age Ahead (p19)

In the context of not only reviewing, but expanding the argument put forth by Jared Diamond in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel about why there are winners and losers among societies and civilizations over the span of world history, she offers this pithy comment on the direction China took long before communism’s rise there.

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I must confess my excitement. Not since reading Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed have I found such a generous overlap between two small islands of my humble “expertise”: City & Regional Planning and History.

For a large portion of June, I will be diving deeper into Dark Age Ahead. This is Jacobs at her most expert, after years of observing societies, cities, economies, and processes. It’s also Jacobs with years and years spent writing. The style and tone are already remarkably different than The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I’m interested in finding out just what kind of capstone Dark Age Ahead serves for her legacy. I wonder at just how much this trying time for our world and society might lend this book the same staying power that The Death and Life of Great American Cities holds 48 years after original publication. It could make for some interesting application this year.