This book inspired me to move forward with what I feel is God's call on my life. If you have confusion about reconciling what you feel God is calling you to do because you are a woman, this book will help you see your way clear. Cindy Jacobs combines solid scriptural research with humor and personal testimony to lead the reader through the issues of the taboo of women in the ministry - as well as many other women in Christianity issues. Very readable.

I loved this book. It has been my desire to find out what my destiny in this life is. This book was a wonderful start as it gave insight on what a woman's destiny.

Cindy Jacobs really lays things out in clear view for you to grasp and understand. It is biblically based. She also has her own personal testimonies interwoven in this book.

This book was a gift from my sister. I will cherish it always. If you are wondering what to do or how to go about finding out what your destiny is, get this book. It has truly blessed me.

This is a special treat from Cindy Jacobs. Cindy's bold approach is not to encroach the male domain, but to reposition women roles to where they should belong in the Body of Christ. She, tactfully, defends the spiritual rights of women, giving classic examples of past and present generals of God who have changed the biased views of women role in the church.

She scores great in her personal testimonies. Her transparency and candor will open up more balance voices in today's marketplace where gender is always an issue. Fortifying her conviction with biblical scriptures, Cindy invades the draconian wall of today's belief that women has no place in the House of the Lord.

This book will gag the mouth of those who fight only for their selfish interest. Many like to interpret the biblical scripture according to their one-sided experiences or singular cultures. So you can see how the expansive meaning of the scriptural text was truncated by the lack of depth in interpreting by ignoring the biblical culture and environmental context when the scripture was first penned. However Cindy cleverly treat the situation by responding with well research and cognitive facts.

Cindy's contents is a healing to wounded female who have been kept backstage for too long. In the same tone, this book also alludes that women when co-exist and co-labor along with men will bring the church potential to the maximum that God intended.

So let's take the saddle off the women, they are going places !

I had the pleasure of a casual acquaintanceship with Mumaw in New York in the 40' and 50's. Always enticing, the narrative is impeccable, and the story itself one well worth telling. The prime student and then lover of Ted Shawn, Mumaw was enriched by the pairing, and when later in life after he had cut the umbilical chord with Shawn, though devastated by Shawn's treacherous behavior, could never bring himself to bring an end to the friendship.

This is one of the best books my five year old daughter and I have ever read. We first got it out of the library, but I just ordered it because it's a book I know we'll re-read hundreds of times. Everybody knows the Grimm's story: twelve princesses escape every night to go dancing. Their father, the king, doesn't know where they go, only that that in the morning their dancing shoes are in tatters. He offers the hand of one of his daughers in marriage to any suitor who can discover their secrets.Many try, and finally one succeeds. There are two wonderful things about this version. One is that it's clear at the end of the book that the daughter who is chosen doesn't marry the man who figured out their secret. She chooses him „ and plans to keep right on dancing after she gets married! The second great thing about this book is the illustrations, which are so beautiful, you just want to look at them again and again. More important, the princesses are all beautiful, but in exotic and interesting ways. No one size fits all Disneyesque beauties here. Each face is unique. One even wears glasses! Terrific book.

It is hardly difficult to understand the enduring quality of the Tao Te Ching. Written by Lao Tsu in the sixth century BC is a simple, quiet book that reflects upon our true nature and our behavior. Broken up into 81 'chapters' or short poems, it comprises a mere 5,000 words. Every other sentence is a memorable quote, and one can read it in an hour and study it for a lifetime.

What I do find remarkable is the durability of this particular edition. My copy is ancient, dating back to my college days. At frequent intervals it seems to come to hand and I will peruse it again and enjoy the clarity of this translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. They have carefully chosen a simple, accessible style which I feel completely captures the nature of the Tao. "What is a good man? A teacher of a bad man.

What is a bad man? A good man's charge."

Accompanying the text are many fine examples of Gia-Fu Feng's calligraphy and Jane English's photographs. While I like Chinese calligraphy, I lack the understanding to make any judgement. I can only report that it shows flow and grace, and works perfectly with English's photographs. These latter capture, most often with natural images, a play of contrast which often is as calligraphic as the accompanying handwriting. Thus, the book itself is a careful balance between content and form.

At the end of the day, or in an otherwise tense moment, this volume has often been the source of the tiny bit of sanity that makes the next day possible. There is much to meditate on here and this edition is a precious resource for the seeking mind.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

So begins this version of the Tao Te Ching. This book provides an experience of the Tao like few others. First, there is the blank page. Lots of white space. The absence, the void.

"The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled."

"Profit comes from what is there, / Usefulness from what is not there."

Emptiness is the vessel which contains the words and images of this experience. Each chapter is written in both English and Chinese. I don't even pretend read Chinese, but the characters evoke a sense of something beyond ...

"The form of the formless / the image of the imageless / it is called indefinable and beyond imagination."

The English translation reads smoothly. This is not the awkward prose frequently stumbled over when a scholar attempts to reproduce the ambiguities of the original in a foreign tongue. These words play smoothly together. The text does

"not tinkle like jade / or clatter like stone chimes."

The final element in this alchemy is the photographs:

"Less and less is done / until non-action is achieved. / When nothing is done, nothing is left undone."

Absent in this volume are the reams of footnotes which clutter most Taos I've read. Absent, too, are chapters on historical background and the relationship to Confucianism. If you seek these things, seek elsewhere.

For me, this book has opened a way to the Tao.

For me, the Tao Te Ching is the most profound book ever written. This version is my personal favorite. I find the the gorgeous pictures go a long way to helping my limited understanding of the text.

Jane Jacob's work has had many reverberations across the United States. The book, written nearly four decades ago, can be credited with helping start the protest and shift of policy makers from using Corbusian designs of urban redevelopment to more traditional rehabilitation, reuse, and revitalization methods to help reinvigorate cities. This book demonstrates the understated complexities and economies of city life, and how those complexities are very fragile and depend on the communication and interaction of people. Most importantly, it helps define community and how community, whether rich or poor, can overcome nearly all social ills and beat the statistics. An essential book for those who study sociology, economics, political science, psychology, architecture, urban planning, and general business

In our urban civilisation reaching thousands of years into history, not one definitive work has chronicled the workings of cities, one of mankind's greatest achievements, as well as Jane Jacobs' landmark 1961 saga of the travails and tribulations of the American city.

The epic spans eras- from the foundations of the Garden City movement in the late 19th century to Jacobs' contemporary 1961. Through this time period she describes how the loathing of urbanism by planners and their subsequent divorce from the realm of public opinion gave rise to the forces of suburbanisation and destruction battering American cities of the mid-20th century. This lays the fundamental groundwork for Jacobs' criticism of contemporary planning methods, especially in her home of New York. Jacobs emanates thoughtful analysis on what works and what does not in regards to the massive projects envisaged and in many cases wrought upon the cityscape.

But perhaps the heart of the book are the chapters in which Jacobs describes how a city works at its most ideal. She chooses only the most exemplary neighbourhoods, those which persevere and spite statistical analysis despite the conventional wisdom of planners. Her own Greenwich Village serves as the book's centrepiece, but Boston's North End and Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square are also featured prominently. Jacobs' arguments for the necessity of density, history, and, above all, diversity in all forms (architectural, street, human, retail, age) are as poignant as they are eloquent. Those pragmatists not immediately taken to heart by Jacobs' paen to urbanity take solace in her intimate and empirical knowledge of economics. Indeed, what makes Jacobs' book so revolutionary is that it does not follow from knowledge handed down by established theory or intellectualism, but from experience, observation, and wisdom, the foundation for her usurpment and subversion of the fallacious atrocities being waged against America's cities.

Liberal at some points, libertarian at others, Jacobs' work must be comprehended not as a work of political ideology but of scientific method. Her opinions are based on but one bias- an innate love for the city. And all who wish to truly understand it in all its objectivity- its trials, mistakes, and triumphs, and her premonitions for our future, are urged to read this. For "Death and Life" is not merely historical perspective on a fleeting problem, but truly a prophecy as well.

This 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, a one-time writer for architectural magazines in New York City, turned the world of city planning on its head. The author, who possessed no formal training in architecture or city planning, relied on personal observations of her surroundings in Greenwich Village in New York City to supply ammunition for her charges against the grand muftis of the architectural profession. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" consists mostly of common sense observations, but there is also a good amount of statistical information, economics, sociology, and some philosophy at the base of the author's arguments. This 1993 Modern Library reprint seeks to bring Jacobs's work to a whole new generation of readers, a necessity when one realizes that a majority of the problems plaguing cities in 1961 continue to be a problem today.

Jacobs begins her book with a brief history of where modern city planning came from. According to the author, the mess we call cities today emerged from Utopian visionaries from Europe and America beginning in the 19th century. Figures such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, and Daniel Burnham all had a significantly dreadful impact on how urban areas are built and rebuilt. These men all envisioned the city as a dreadful place, full of overcrowding, crime, disease, and ugliness. Howard wished to destroy big cities completely in order to replace them with small towns, or "Garden Cities," made up of small populations. Similar in thought to Howard, Mumford argued for a decentralization of cities into thinned out areas resembling towns. Le Corbusier, says Jacobs, inaugurated yet another harmful plan for cities: the "Radiant City." A radiant city consists of skyscrapers surrounded by wide swaths of parks where vast concentrations of people herded into one area could live and work. Burnham's contribution to planning was "City Monumental," where all of the grand buildings (libraries, government buildings, concert halls, landmarks) of a city could be clustered in one agglomeration separated from the dirty, bad city. Jacobs writes that all of these ideas continue to exert influence on the modern city, and that all of these ideas do not work.

For Jacobs, the key to a successful city rests on one word: diversity. This is not specifically an ethnic diversity, although Jacobs does vaguely include this in her arguments. Rather, diversity means different buildings, different residences, different businesses, and different amounts of people in an area at different times. The antithesis of diversity is what we see today on a stroll through downtown: a bland uniformity of office buildings, apartment dwellings, and houses that stretch as far the eyes can see. In the author's view, this lack of diversification leads to economic stagnation, slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that are all too familiar to viewers of the evening news. Especially egregious to Jacobs is the tendency to isolate low-income people in towering projects surrounded by empty space. The lack of embedded businesses in these areas, along with closed in hallways and elevators (which Jacobs calls "interior sidewalks and streets") creates a breeding ground for criminal elements and bad morale among the residents. Cities that work best employ a wide range of diverse interests that attract, not repel, people. Unfortunately, bureaucrats and social planners always believe top down planning is better than bottom up initiative. Jacobs tries to show the fallacy of social planning.

The amount of ground covered in this book is amazing. The author examines the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. Repeatedly, Jacobs discovered fatal errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffic, city blocks so long that people avoided walking down them, and city governments too fragmented to carry on effective management. All of these things eventually led to abandonment and degradation. Even worse, when a planned section of the city failed the planners came back and razed it to the ground in order to replace it with yet more failure.

One of Jacobs's failings in the book is that she never seems to make the connection between urban planning and social control. The housing projects are a great example. By isolating the poor, blacks as well as whites and other ethnic minorities, the state practices an effective control over these people's lives. This book inspired me to check into the fate of Cabrini-Green, Chicago's notorious housing projects that served as a role model for the abject uselessness of urban planning. These projects are in the process of being razed and replaced by mixed-income houses that, if Jacobs is accurate, may thrive due to the nearby presence of shopping areas and businesses. Of course, the planners are still in the game because they are sending most of the poor residents to other areas of the city.

I am probably not the best person to judge the merits of this book because I have never been to one of Jacobs's "Great Cities." I had difficulty imagining some of the layouts she mentioned in the book due to the simple fact that I have never seen them. Despite this small problem, there is still plenty of information in this book that does make perfect sense. You do not need to live in New York City or Philadelphia to recognize that parks with no sunlight will not be a big hit with the city denizens, or that older buildings are necessary to a neighborhood because they allow small businesses to exist with low overhead costs. "The Death and Life of Great Cities," despite its age, is still a relevant book well worth reading.

As one who has a newfound interest for complexity science, I felt that this book gave me the keys to observing cities as examples of complex systems. I don't know whether Stockholm qualifies as a "great city" (concering its size), but I think what she writes applies well to what I have observed here. Being able to apply what Jacobs writes about to what I see every day has reinforced my understanding of complexity science.

I also read the book with the hope to find out whether urban planning could serve as an analogy for software development. I think that it can, but I haven't thought about this enough to express the ways in which it's relevant. Jacobs writes that neighborhoods which have particular properties (short blocks, diversity of primary uses, etc.) will "work" -- that there are properties which, when present, almost guarantee that neighborhoods will thrive. I have a feeling that such properties exist for software development teams and the systems they develop; the question is what they are.

This book is one of those that stay with you, and influence your thinking in other areas.

City Planning, a dismal field dominated by craven kleptocrats, shifty real estate developers, sleazy lawyers and lazy desk jokey bureaucrats, gets a much needed upgrade here.

From the outset, Jane Jacobs makes it clear that this is an attack on City Planning as it's done by most city governments. It's almost Jeffersonian in its recommednations: teh cities that are the most livable are those which are the least planned by top-heavy, over-manageed bureaucracies.

Like all whose insigts are brilliant, Jacobs' observations and recommendations are deliberately distorted or totally ignored by those who are actively involved in "city planning" in nearly every American City.

THE ECONOMY OF CITIES and Jane Jacobs' writings generally, serve to illustrate the major problems for those with brilliant insights, sagacious advice, and great wisdom: the people who should be the prime audience are not interested.

The title of this book is slightly misleading, because the thesis of the book is that cities play an essential role in the process of economic development. Although its anecdotal style gives this book a disarmingly unsystematic appearance, this is a profound book. It is easily one of the most important books written during the 20th century. Economic development is something about which conventional marginal utility economics has very little to say. The Economy of Cities, therefore, fills a kind of void. It stands to conventional economics in much the same position as quantum physics stands to classical physics.

A simply wonderful book.

Lancelot Fletcher lrf@aya.yale.edu

An excellent story with plenty of meat. Hannah Breece is a woman both of her time and ahead of her time. This book, although covering the early 1900's, really tells of a time when the balance and control of Alaska was switching from Russian influenced culture to American influenced culture. It is interesting to see that what was "correct" then is now "incorrect" and reminds the reader that values and judgements are culturally bound.

The action of the book takes place over most of the major regions of the state including the gulf coast, the interior and the southeast.

Jane Jacobs the editor did an excellent job of organizing and illuminating Hannah Breece's story. Without her careful introductions the story would have not had quite the same postive impact.

This book is largely alone in covering the topic of teaching in the early 1900's. For those of you interested in the early history of teaching in English in Alaska then this is your book.

In 1904, Hannah Breece (1859-1940), was recruited by the Department of the Interior to teach in Alaska. Alaska at that time was quite different than today. Preferring to work in poorer, more backward areas, she saw a side of Alaska that does not normally appear in the history books. This is Hannah stories, as told by her, and edited by Jane Jacobs.

This is a really great story. I found its depiction of life in 1904+ Alaska to be quite enthralling; Hannah certainly found her way into many fascinating adventures. The book shows life in 1904+ Alaska, as lived by the common people, including dealing with wild animals, sled dogs, fish famines, earthquakes, racism at many levels, and so much more.

All I can say is that Hannah Breece must have been a formidable woman. I have never said this before of a book, but I actually felt honored to be able to look in at Hannah's life. I highly recommend this book!

A factual memoir that relays much interesting Alaskan history through description of a school teacher's experience in small,remote villages at the turn of the last century(1904). Hannah Breece's motivation is inspirational;the day to day survival and travel challenges are thrillingly refreshing (try to imagine complaining about the hardships of your suburban day after the tales of adversities thanks to very humbling terrain, wildlife and US bureaucracy);the maps, photos, and profiles of the different types of Alaskan people are historic and truly educational.This book was great ...don't miss the forward, the puzzles, and the epilogue!

In Innocents Abroad, Twain joins a passenger excursion to Europe and the mideast. Along the way, he and his fellow excursionists visit the Azores, Gibraltar, Paris, Venice, Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo and a host of places in between. Twain's acerbic wit is on full display as he offers up what are occasionally laugh-out-loud critiques of the places and people he encounters. Even his fellow passengers receive a ribbing, for which they often deserve, as they "chip" their way through the mideast removing souvenir pieces of religiously historic architecture. Innocents Abroad is not for the easily offended. This is a pre-PC view of the world which, properly judged for it's age, is highly entertaining.

The second book of this volume is Roughing It. Here, Twain takes us on a sojourn to the American west in the company of his older brother. Roughing It is possibly the best contemporaneous account of life in America's 19th century western expanse and beyond. From stagecoach travel to silver mining, exploration and discovery to regional ecomonics, lifestyle, and lawlessness, Twain provides the reader a humorous look at the many facets of Manifest Destiny.

As always, Library of America is a splendid publisher with an quality product priced attractively. I recommend this volume wholeheartedly.

NOTE: Amazon occasionally has difficulty connecting the right edition with the right review. This review is for the Library of America volume containing both Innocents Abroad and Roughing It by Mark Twain.

Ok, maybe that is a minor overstatement, but this is one hilarous book, to be read by people who have travelled, who plan to travel, and generally, people who want to laugh. A lot.

The book is also surprising for its timeless points about the journeying of certain upper white, middle class people going on a grand tour of Europe. I frequently had to remind myself that it was written in 1869 because his observations and the behavior of his shipmates is so close to the way people I studied abroad with acted-only a few years ago.

Twain also puts those "cosmopolitan" people who claim to have traveled, but don't know anything about any place they have been but and just like to lord it over everyone else that they have "travelled" and you have not.

Reading this book is like listening to a very wise, old man tell you about his adventures. Its not like a book, more like one long conversation. Twain takes nothing seriously-not himself, his fellow travelers or the places they visit. The words are another adventure-sometimes, you know he is setting you up for something, other times he is serious for a while, then you end up in the middle of a joke.

I know this is against the rules, but the other posters who don't like this book-don't be so serious and p.c. all the time. Twain is making humorous observations, at a time when a different standard was acceptable. Not to mention, he does manage to get a few zingers in there about what people are willing to accept and what they do not.

You will laugh yourself silly and want to book a trip-not to Europe, just to anywhere, after reading this book.

This book, along with Twain's 'Roughing It,' is often considered to be some of the best travel narrative ever put to paper. Certainly it deserves its acclaim. Twain, the irreverent All-American writer, took a trip halfway around the world in a steamer and visited many of the great sites of Europe and the Middle East. This is his account of his experiences, and the experiences of the group of 'Pilgrims' which accompanied him on this 'pleasure excursion.'

One of the best things about Twain is his refusal to romanticize, even in the cases of the greatest places in the world. He does not hesitate to verbally abuse Paris, Florence, Damascus, even Jerusalem. He tells it how it is, refusing to admire the work of the great painters (Raphael, Michael Angelo, and co.) and asserting that everyone who ever wrote of the beauty of the Sea of Galilee was a downright liar. He has some good things to say, too (he seems to have approved of Athens), but mostly he spends his time dispelling the romantic images of the great places of the world. The result is hilarious, and certainly makes one realize that, despite the perfect images that Paris, Pisa, and Rome sometimes have in our minds, they are a far cry from paradise.

Twain's wit, as always, is very sharp, and this book is an excellent example of it. His antics (and descriptions of them) are very funny, and his way of putting things a joy to read. Along the way, he pokes fun of the American "Pilgrims," who deface the sacred relics they visit and call every guide they have 'Ferguson.' This is certainly a classic in American Literature. Anyone interested in travel writing will profit greatly from this book, as will anyone who enjoys Twain's humor or just a good laugh.

Jane Jacobs - Systems of Survival

We deserve better from the woman who brought us "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Systems of Survival is, more or less, Jacobs' explanation of how the world works: a celebrated urban sociologist using all the insight she has gathered over the years to give us her interpretation of the foundations of commerce and politics. Sounds great, doesn't it? Except it isn't.

Turns out that Jacobs' vision of commerce and politics comes down to "how we get stuff", or, in other words, the titular systems of survival. There are only two systems and they are pretty simple, either we take stuff ("guardian" system) or we trade for it ("commercial" system). Each system also comes with its own dictates, such as "Shun force" and "Compete" (the trading system) and "Exert prowess" and "Be ostentatious" (the taking system). The problem is that these systems that Jacobs deals with are little more than the "traditional/modern" society dichotomy that has been around for years and years. Consequently these systems aren't all that groundbreaking.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem except that about one third of the way through Jacobs circles the wagons and refuses to add anything new to the mix. Instead of taking these systems to the limits and covering some new ground Jacobs simply keeps chasing the same ideas around and around. More specifically, once we learn that the guardian system is good for some things (like administration) and the commercial system is good for others (like distributing goods) but that a combination of the two systems never works out, the book more or less stops generating ideas. Of course this excludes several questions: why do some societies have systems performing the "wrong" tasks, how have and how will these systems change over time, how do these contradictory systems coexist, what regulates them. Also, what about ideas that aren't covered by the two systems? There are a lot of questions implicit in Jacobs' thesis, most of which go unanswered.

Perhaps as a footnote to all this is the oddity that Jacobs chose to write this as a "Socratic" dialog. The dialog is chunky, the characters one dimensional, the plot is completely absent; clearly the book would have made more sense as a work of non-fiction.

Systems of Survival is a decent read if you know next to nothing about sociology. If you don't fit that criterion but you still want to read it, I'd recommend getting this book from the library and skimming it.

An excellent, thought provoking work, some examples from 1980's are interesting as we see the same patterns unwinding in Enron's and similar catastrophys.
I have to disagree with her that these are the "ONLY" systems, there is a mass of humans that unlike the written about, self chosen leadership of the world, would appear to operate with a philosophy of "don't risk on prowess or venture", try to avoid attention or be unnoticed, hourd and squirrel away... These are often the peasant/prol/workers that serve the groups described use, manipulate and even claim to own but from an eco/eco point of view, they have a functional syndrome for survival. The fact that they "take and trade" resources dosn't pull them fully into the ethical system of either Gardians or Merchant/Traders. They might also be be characterized by concerns over "reciprococity" which often plays out differently than Honor, or Negotiation.
A somewhat reality grounded book about ethics with an interesting Aristotolian concept.

I have seldom read a more thought-provoking, stimulating, and fascinating book than this.

The author uses two techniques that are particularly useful in conveying this rich material - Socratic dialog, and inductive reasoning. The wealth of examples and the detailed analysis are compelling, yet as a reader you feel free to disagree, to question, and to challenge the ideas being presented -- all good exercise for the mind.

The book's thesis is discussed elsewhere. Suffice it to say I find that thesis highly persuasive, and I plan to put it to the test in coming months. I recommend this book highly.

It's probably not a good sign when you find yourself laughing at what is supposed to be a serious, scholarly, economic work, which is exactly what I found myself doing at Jane Jacob's "Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life."

This book is definitely a product of its time. It was originally issued in 1984; a time when the United States, and most other industrialized economies, were finally emerging from what had been an almost 15 year economic malaise known as "stagflation". Stagflation was a new reality in the Western world. The West had not experienced a time in its recent economic history when inflation and unemployment levels were rising in tandem. There were many pundits at the time trying to figure out why exactly that was happening. "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" is Jacobs' crack at an explanation.

Her foundation is good: cities, in so far as they are the largest accumulations of human talent and intelligence, are the economic engines of nations. However, Jacobs goes astray by forgetting what it is that makes cities important, human ingenuity, and by treating cities as organic, almost sentient beings. Cities are important because they are the largest reservoirs of human skills and for no more.

Jacobs believes that cities should be given precedence over national economies to the point where individual cities would almost certainly function better as independent city-states. In a perfect world, this may be so; but, as we all know, we hardly live in a perfect world. There is a reason why city-states either voluntarily joined to form larger nation-states or were forcibly joined by more powerful neighbors: security.

Nation-states offer security from foreign coercion to otherwise unprotected cities. It's unlikely that the thriving cities of Europe like Paris, London, or Milan would have acceded to their current heights had they remained as independent cities. They would have been constantly exposed to raids and attacks by more powerful and jealous neighbors bent on taking their wealth. A people need to feel secure in their persons in order to concentrate their efforts on the business of business. That security is best provided by the nation-state.

Also, her premise that each city would be better off with its own currency is beyond funny. Reality has shown us that any time a business is forced to deal with many different currencies to provide for most of its revenues it will be restrained by transaction costs across those currencies. The largest multinational corporations derive most of their revenues from only a few currencies. They may deal in a large number of them but only a few supply most of their revenues. This arrangement reduces transaction costs and allows businesses to use their funds in a more productive fashion.

With "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", Jacobs was sounding the death knell of Western progress. According to her, New York, London, Boston, Frankfurt, etc. should be rotting corpses of their former selves by now. Instead, the past 17 years since this book was published has seen one of the most remarkable economic expansions in the history of the world, not to mention Western civilization. Western cities are thriving despite many serious problems that need to be dealt with.

Along with these thriving cities goes thriving nations. Western nations still reign supreme when it comes to economic and military might. That last one is important because Jacobs believes that a standing military is by nature a presage of decline. It's funny though how many of our current everyday economic tranactions involve items that were spurred by defense purposes: commercial airlines, microwave ovens, communications satellites, the interstate highway system, the internet, etc. Far from being a drain on economic wealth, defense spending, within reason, is a spur to economic development of the most important kind: high-tech, cutting-edge production.

"Cities and the Wealth of Nations" is good reading for getting a glimpse into the end-of-the-world paranoia that plagues us at the end of any long economic backslide. We didn't get too much of it in 1992 because that slide was so short-lived. Although I'm sure that many "chicken little" books like this one were starting through the pipeline when we started our recovery.

Some of your other reviewers have said that they believe this book is outdated.

That is, I can't help but think, the reaction of internet babies, who are spoiled by the 24 hour round-the-clock updating of bloggers.

This is a printed book that gives evidence of having been written at a certain moment in history, and in a certain portion of the planet. So what? That is true of all great books, and the question for us is whether we can (a) appreciate that context while (b) taking from them something lasting.

The answer, for this book, is decidedly afirmative.

"Any settlement that becomes import-replacing becomes a city." Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs

Written by an economist, this is a very unusual book. Ms. Jacobs is not hampered by orthodox preconceived notions, misleading postulated theoretical myths like utility optimization, rationality, or efficient markets. These standard phrases of neo-classical economic theory cannot be found in her book. Instead, and although her discussion is entirely nonmathematical, she uses a crude qualtitative idea of excess demand dynamics, of growth vs. decline. Her expectation is never of equilibrium. The notion of equilibrium never appears in this book. Jacobs instead describes qualitatively the reality of nonequilibrium in the economic life of cities, regions, and nations. She concentrates on the surprises of economic reality.

Jacobs argues fairly convincingly that significant, distributed wealth is created by cities that are inventive enough to replace imports by their own local production, that this is the only reliable source of wealth for cities in the long run, and that these cities need other like-minded cities to trade with in order to survive and prosper. Her expectation is of growth or decline, not of equilibrium. If she is right then the Euro and the European Union are a bad mistake, going entirely in the wrong direction. As examples in support of her argument she points to independent cites like Singapore and Hong Kong with their own local currencies. Other interesting case histories are TVA, small villages in France and Japan, other cases in Italy, Columbia, Ethiopia, US, Iran, ... .

The book begins in the chapter "Fool's Paradise' with discussions of Keynsian economics and Phillips curves (the Philips curve idea is demolished convincingly by Ormerod in "The Death of Economics"), I. Fisher and monetarism, and Marxism. These were all ideas requiring equilibria of one sort or another. Also interesting: her description why, in the long run, imperialism is bound to fail, written in 1984, well before the fall of the USSR. Her prediction for the fate of the West is not better. Jacobs is aware of the idea of feedback and relies on it well and heavily. She is a sharp observor of economic behavior and is well versed in economic history. This book will likely be found interesting by a scientifically-minded reader who is curious about how economies work, and why all older theoretical ideas (Keynes, monetarism, ... ) have failed to describe economies as they evolve.

I'm grateful to Yi-Ching Zhang of the Econophysics Forum for recommending this book.