Volume 15, Number 4 · September 3, 1970
In the Cage
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Families Against the City
by Richard Sennett
Harvard, 258 pp., $8.50
The Uses of Disorder
by Richard Sennett
Knopf, 198 pp., $5.95
There are certain classical patterns of scholarship which are still both useful and beautiful to watch; and which few scholars any longer trouble to carry through completely. The failure to do so results in bitty and irrelevant research of the most familiar kind. The rare exception is both satisfying in its craftsmanship and exciting as a source of important and original ideas. These two books constitute such a classic model. In the first, Professor Sennett reports the findings of an odd and seemingly arcane documentary investigation of the composition and characteristics of the households of a declining middle-class neighborhood of Chicago during the years 1872-1890, using the city directories of those years to follow the fortunes of persons more completely reported in the Census of 1880, and he draws some startling conclusions. In the second, more speculative, work, he develops the theory that he tested in the research reported in the first; and the perceptions that led him to select this commonplace tract of nearly a century ago for intensive study become the source of insights that are radically relevant to the current urban crisis.
Review, 4778 words
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