Although published 17 years ago, this book eerily describes cultural events that are happening in North America today. From loss of affordable housing and minimum wage employment to science as "fake news" to making public services "cost-effective" or revenue generators, Jacobs ties all these symptoms to great civilizations that no longer exist. For those Americans currently enamored by the idea of a Canada as utopia, Jacobs uses many examples and case studies that show both the U.S. and Canada are on a parallel path. Both a historical review and a path out of the morass, this work is "both a gloomy and a hopeful book."

Prescient. I wish more people had read it, years ago.

Uneven, more rants than logic here. Reads like a series of linked opinion editorials.

I just went back to re-read this book, ten years on, to get a re-assessment of its worth and validity in the light of recent events. Sad to say, apart from having correctly predicted the US housing crash, it doesn't hold up very well. Jacobs betrays her own prejudices and socio-economic bias, presenting her opinions as facts, the very sin she decries in those who oppose her. I suppose she meant well but in several places she comes across as ill-informed and willfully blind to facts that would weaken her argument.
Case in point is her ludicrous assertion that closing a roadway makes traffic "disappear"! When I drove to work every day in Toronto for 17 years and found my regular route closed or congested, I did what everyone else did: I took another route. By her admission, she never drove or owned a car. How could she possibly know what she was talking about? At the other end of the urban-rural spectrum, she states on pg. 162 that former "bread baskets" have become redundant, indicating that we have a surplus of arable farmland -- that despite a world population that has more than doubled in just the past few years. She seemed to be unaware that vast areas of farmland in areas such as the Great Plains, North Africa and Australia are becoming much less productive due to widespread and chronic drought. Gaffes such as that, along with many others destroy her credibility, which is unfortunate because we need people with the courage (and the academic rigor to support it) to challenge today's leaders and help us find real solutions to real issues. This book doesn't cut it.

Sadly, I believe this may have been Ms. Jacobs final book before her passage. A most clever and brilliant little book (quite short) where she most adeptly and sneakily convinces one of all those pesky little situations really were criminal conspiracies after all, and there actually was collusion among those corporate giants. Recently, on yet another of NPR's propaganda shows (and that's about the only American media I occassionally listen to, but never again), they claimed all this stuff, about General Motors, Firestone, and Sun Oil (Sunococ) and a conspiracy to replace trolleys with their buses, run on their gasoline, using their tires, was all so much "conspiracy theory" nonsense (they must have mentioned their phrase, "conspiracy theory" several dozen times. [I was actually in attendance at those congressional committee hearings in 1975, when retired executives from those three corporations testified, under oath, that they did indeed conspire to do such perfidious activities!] Read Ms. Jacobs' book, please. (Although 99% perfect, she did make one error, whereby she ignores her own advice to "never assume" she unfortunately assumed that the US foreign aid program was really meant to do what its mission state claims --- if only she had read Nomi Prins' "Other People's Money" and Nicholas Shaxson's "Treasure Islands" !!!) Given the state of mind of the average American today, we really have already reached that "dark age" which Ms. Jacobs pondered - - people so ignorant as to be clueless as to how bereft of the most basic knowledge they actually are!

I reference this all the time. insightful.

A great book that just touches the surface of the problems facing society in the coming age. A must read for anyone who has ever wondered what happened to community and how we can begin to fix it, Jacobs manages to create something that is at once both thoroughly digestible and highly informative.