Written by two Boston women who are also illustrators, “Genius of Common Sense’’ is a readable and well-researched biography that succeeds in capturing Jacobs and her world, not only in words but in drawings and period photos. It’s promoted as a “book for young readers,’’ which it certainly is, but it’s better than that. It’s the best short introduction yet to the life and work of one of the most influential Americans of her generation.
It presents Jacobs as a woman in full, growing up happy but restless in Scranton, Pa., moving to New York, skipping college, getting married, having kids, trying different jobs, visiting and learning from many places, always observing, comparing, thinking. We know where she’s coming from when she emerges as the woman who takes the lead in saving her own and other neighborhoods from the ideas of self-serving developers and arrogant public officials - people who, if they’d been allowed to get away with it, would have destroyed some of New York’s most cherished places.
One of this reviewer’s favorite lines is by Nobel Prize author Doris Lessing: “When principles are invoked, common sense flies out the window.’’ Jacobs would have endorsed that view. She had little patience with abstract thinkers and academic theories. She looked closely at the real world with her own eyes and drew her own conclusions, always asking the same question: “What works?’’
Jacobs moved to Hudson Street in the first place because she loved the busy, diverse city life she found there in the neighborhood known as the West Village. The lessons she learned from her street became the basis of her famous book. In that era of so-called urban renewal, older, poorer neighborhoods like hers were too often viewed as slums. Using federal funding, planners and developers simply wiped them out. Streets filled with people were replaced by lifeless towers and plazas. Boston’s old West End neighborhood, now the bland, isolated Charles River Park, is a notorious example.
