From Genius of Common Sense, a new young-adult biography of Jane Jacobs by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch, I learned that Jacobs was an independent-minded young girl:
When Jane’s third-grade teacher asked the class to raise their hands if they promised to brush their teeth every day for the rest of their lives, Jane refused to raise her hand and urged the other children not to raise theirs. . . Jane was expelled from school for the day.
Where have I read that before? In Chimamanda Adichie’s The Headstrong Historian:
Her teacher Sister Maureen told her that she could not refer to the call-and-response her grandmother had taught her as poetry, because primitive tribes did not have poetry. It was Grace who would laugh and laugh until Sister Maureen took her to detention.
Genius of Common Sense is plainly a labor of love, with a great selection of photographs and a belief in Jacobs’s importance that you might say “shines through the book like a watermark” (Nabokov). The subtitle is “Jane Jacobs and the story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities” but that isn’t right: It’s mostly about how Jacobs and her neighbors fended off Robert Moses to preserve Greenwich Village. Which is a lot more visual. As I read it I kept wondering what I would have thought of it had I picked it up as, say, a third grader. I read a lot of biographies for children back then. I might have been attracted by the weird title and helped along by the high ratio (1 to 1) of picture space to word space. I would have liked the underdog aspect. Would I have appreciated the humor of
Several years later the Lower Manhattan Expressway was to raise its ugly head again. “The rule of thumb is that you have to kill expressways three times before they die,” Jane quipped.
? Probably not. But maybe I would have noticed how much the authors cared about their subject.