Also, she was ?fat and dumpy,? according to the book There?s a new biography of Jane Jacobs out this week, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, by Robert Kanigel. It?s the longest and most comprehensive book so far on an influential person who arguably changed the way we looked at cities. But several disappointing passages demonstrate that this biography is, sadly, too preoccupied with the way she looked.
A blistering review in the New York Times by Dwight Garner describes the book as a ?word-heap,? that?s ?graceless, infantilizing of its subject and strangely unbuttoned in tone.? But this part of the review particularly stood out to me:
Ms. Jacobs was a tall, owlish, arresting presence. People stared at her and thought, ?Who is that person"? I dissent from Mr. Kanigel?s flat assertion that ?she was never beautiful.? I dissent further when he writes, ?She was not even memorably unbeautiful.? He goes on to call her ?pudding-faced? when older and, later, ?fat and dumpy.? Fat and dumpy! What prose!
Surely these phrases were taken out of context, I thought, so I went in search of the passages from the actual book.
Unbelievably, it gets worse:
She was never beautiful. She was not even memorably unbeautiful; for long stretches of her public life, she was a pudding-faced old lady in ill-fitting jumper [sic] and sneakers.
And a few sentences later, this:
Her language was lucid, but you don?t get a hold on people by being merely lucid. It was disruptive, too?comba...