Monthly Archives: September 2011

Book Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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Fantasy and reality of life on the sidewalks
by Jane Jacobs
Review by Brian Wright

Death and Life of Great American CitiesThis exceptional book was highly touted by Ayn Rand’s coterie of intellectuals back in the day of The Objectivist Newsletter (early 1960s). Jane Jacobs came along in the same era—Death and Life of Great American Cities (Cities) was published in 1961—which was also the heyday of the Great Society programs, where good intentions and city planning could do no wrong.

Jacobs, a citizen-scholar of multiple subjects and a lifelong social activist for individuals and communities as they do and ought to live, devoted her life to truth above conventional practice or slavish obedience to authority. Cities is a tour de force of practical enlightenment: it’s like The Way Things Work about cities… not the way they are supposed to work. More than anything, Jane Jacobs is a people person, as are her cities: Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: 911 at 10

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Thoughts on the 10th anniversary of the
worldchanging criminal terror operation, 9/11/01
by Brian Wright

Today, on the 10th anniversary, we Americans remember not only our countrymen who suffered and perished as a direct consequence of the criminal terror operation (CTO) of that 11th day of September 2001 (9/11)… we also mourn the suffering and loss of millions of victims worldwide created by the wars, war crimes, and military occupations that 9/11 was used to sanction. Continue reading →

Book Review: What about gods?

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Children’s story on letting go of make-believe
by Chris Brockman
Review by Brian Wright

What about Gods?This marvelous little book came from a very special individual out of a milieu in the young libertarian movement in Michigan in the mid-1970s. There was a certain orthodoxy to that milieu; I remember Chris and his wife Julie seemed on the ‘free spirit’ end of the general ‘rational-libertarian’ structure of our sociology at the time.[1] Chris and Julie were always more antiwar and anticorporate than most of us in those days, and had solid secular-humanist credentials. We in the secular Objectivist-libertarian center had read and heard all the excellent intellectual refutations of the concept of God.[2] I, personally, manifested egoic arrogance in my understanding, to the point of minimizing more humane perspectives. Continue reading →