Summer Fun: At the beach or the cottage, you may want to read about the city

Comment (print and online) is an amazing general-interest magazine with a reformational broad-cultural concern. The lastest issue carries one of those "Summer Reading" lists, this one by Eric O. Jacobsen, "The space between: summer reading on cities" (Apr27,2k7). To Jacobsen's list of 10 books, I've dared supplementarily to add Jacobsen's own title on his chosen topic. And then, out of sheer favouritism, I've also appended at list's end my own candidate, a volume that was such a wonderful read for me when I first ventured into its pages decades ago. I'm sure subsequent works covering the same ground have since added important new ins+ts; but my nominee, like the first title on Jacobsen's own list, is a classic on the subject it addresses.

1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

2. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

3. James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition

4. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

5. Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets

6. David Solomon, Global City Blues

7. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier

8. Daniel Kemmis, The Good City and the Good Life: Renewing the American Community

9. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

Summer Fun > Reading Books, by Owlb

10. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace: The Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University in Amsterdam

11. Eric O. Jacobsen, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith

12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Jacobsen gives us more than my barebones reproduction of his list (with my two supplements, to which I could add a second Wolterstorff title, Art in Action that includes at least a chapter on the aesthetics of any city made for living in, pleasantly...but if I added that, I would move the list into the numerics of 13, instead of dwelling restfully in the numeric symbology of 12, one book title for each of the Apostles).

I must say that Jacobsen's discussion of each title on his list is brief, but not too brief that we get only hype and no ins+t. We do get ins+t about each book, Jacobsen's measure of each. Realizing this genre of writing an intro to several books at a time, in one article, is achieved quite artfully by the author. So much so that a reader (who finds her/his summer will allow sufficient leisure for the project) could decide to make one's way thru the entire list. For this purpose, the list offers the utility of selecting what you want to read first and what second; there's suffcient matter to make your choices according to your own reading-plan.

I suggest you click-up the Comment page (live-linked above) and enjoy a good read as served-up by Jacabosen. If you want to get any or all the books into your own hands as soon as possible, each of the works' titles are live-linked to Amazon's book retailing service. You can purchase direct, of course, or you could read the reviews, then go out and find what's available at Barnes and Noble,