Becoming Jane Jacobs
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Narrated by:
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Byrwec Ellison
About this listen
Becoming Jane Jacobs is the first intellectual biography to focus on Jacobs's early life and writing career leading up to her great book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the most important figures in American urbanism, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities one of the most important books on cities. However, because of her David-versus-Goliath battles with "power broker" Robert Moses and the urban-renewal establishment, Jacobs has received more attention for being an activist than a thinker, despite having written a list of influential books on cities, economies, and other subjects.
In Becoming Jane Jacobs, Dr. Peter L. Laurence shows that what is missing from the stereotypes and myths is a critical examination of how Jacobs arrived at her ideas about city life. The audiobook shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she pursued a writing career that prepared her to become a nationally recognized architectural critic. Jacobs was immersed in an elite community of architects, city planners, and academics as an editor of the Time Inc. magazine Architectural Forum.
The audiobook is published by University of Pennsylvania Press.
"This audiobook is both a worthy tribute to Jacobs's genius, and a brilliant exposition of the broader context of designs and ideas that made her work possible." (Robert Fishman, University of Michigan).
"Deeply researched and richly illuminating, Laurence's audiobook will fundamentally change the way we think about Jacobs today." (Joan Ockman, editor of Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology).
"Adds immeasurably to our understanding of her rich, formative years in New York City." (Robert Wojtowicz, Old Dominion University).
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- By: Jonathan Sperber
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 22 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the 19th century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States' leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre's than to those of 20th-century Marxists.
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Informative intellectual biography, poor reading
- By anonymous on 10-25-13
By: Jonathan Sperber
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Two Cheers for Anarchism
- Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing - one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions.
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Three cheeers for Two cheers for Anarchism
- By doodoo on 01-16-16
By: James C. Scott
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The Austrian School of Economics
- A History of Its Ideas, Ambassadors, & Institutions
- By: Eugen Maria Schulak, Herbert Unterköfler
- Narrated by: Paul Strikwerda
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Austrian School is in the news as never before. It is discussed on business pages, in academic journals, and in speeches by public figures. At long last, there is a brilliant and engaging guide to the history, ideas, and institutions of the Austrian School of economics. It is written by two Austrian intellectuals who have gone to the sources themselves to provide a completely new look at the tradition and what it means for the future.
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Good book about Austrian Economics and it's histor
- By Kyle and Dawn Christerson on 04-30-19
By: Eugen Maria Schulak, and others
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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You Belong to the Universe
- Buckminster Fuller and the Future
- By: Jonathon Keats
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.
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Bucky, Bucky, Bucky
- By Amazon Customer on 08-25-18
By: Jonathon Keats
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Hitler's American Model
- The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
- By: James Q. Whitman
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime.
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Did not we suspect this?
- By dessa on 11-04-18
By: James Q. Whitman
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Paris Reborn
- Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City
- By: Stephane Kirkland
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings. The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opra Garnier, was built.
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Why Paris looks the way it does today
- By Neil Chisholm on 11-28-13
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Kingdom of Characters
- The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
- By: Jing Tsu
- Narrated by: Jing Tsu
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.
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Missed important information
- By Ms. on 04-01-22
By: Jing Tsu
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Reappraisals
- Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century
- By: Tony Judt
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 16 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a similarly accelerated amnesia. The 20th century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 was so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it - and the results are proving calamitous.
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Superb. Insightful essays, Performance to match
- By Louis on 05-02-12
By: Tony Judt
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Future Shock
- By: Alvin Toffler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Future Shock is about the present. Future Shock is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations - even our patterns of friendship and love. Future Shock vividly describes the emerging global civilization: tomorrow's family life, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships - all of them temporary. It illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless cliches about today.
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So Accurate
- By Peter Gracia on 03-31-19
By: Alvin Toffler
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China in the 21st Century, 3rd Edition
- What Everyone Needs to Know
- By: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fully revised and updated third edition, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world's newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce listeners to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization.
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Amazing!
- By Anonymous User on 07-11-20
By: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, and others