Robert Kanigel

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author and former M.I.T. professor ROBERT KANIGEL for a discussion of Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, the first major biography of the woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, whose influence can still be felt in any discussion of urban planning to this day.

About Eyes on the Street

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates--all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets, while amassing the knowledge she would draw upon to write her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here, too, is the activist who helped lead an ultimately successful protest against Robert Moses's proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village; and who, in order to keep her sons out of the Vietnam War, moved to Canada, where she became as well known and admired as she was in the United States.

Praise

"The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which turned the world of city planning upside down, has become a cultural icon. Robert Kanigel’s compelling biography fleshes out a complicated and at the same time straightforward person: 'She worked hard; she finished what she started.'" —Witold Rybczynski

"Perceptive, informative, and a useful companion for readers of Jane Jacobs’s classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is also an inspirational story of a restless small town girl who heads to the big city with only her shorthand skills, but quickly transforms herself from secretary to journalist, to well-known architectural critic and then an internationally famous author." —Herbert Gans, author of The Levittowners and Imagining America in 2033

"Kanigel delivers the most complete biography of Jane Jacobs to date, reveling in her distinctive genius even as he shies from the usual deification. He shows Jacobs to be a fierce personality, a devoted writer, and above all human." —Timothy Mennel, co-editor, Reconsidering Jane Jacobs