Teaching Difficult History through Film ed. by Jeremy Stoddard, Alan S. Marcus, and David Hicks (review)

Abstract

gagement he documents. More than once, he adduces Richard Sennett’s notion of the “tyranny of intimacy” (7, 133). He seems to second Jacobs’s remark that “togetherness” is a “nauseating” (134) ideal by which to organize urban life. Th e socialrealist melodramas of the New Deal, spelled out in embarrassing detail, for him mark the “exhaustion” (69) of sympathy, a “simplifi ed and unimaginative discourse” (74) that “will inevitably fall short” (70) of channeling urban variety into something nourishing and new. Rowan and his thinkers enshrine “sophistication” of thought— a watchword of the early New Yorker— “nuanced and enriched” (13) emotional palettes, and a Trillingian “complexity” in all things. He shows a refreshing skepticism toward sentimentalisms on the right and left alike— sententious old saws regarding the family bond on one hand, readymade “consciousness” or “brotherhood” on the other. Although he acknowledges that Jacobs could descend into romanticism— the famous “sidewalk ballet” scene from Death and Life can come off as a laissezfaire fantasia— he mostly commends her urge to cast “webs” of association in which the units, always under construction, are “peoples,” not “persons” (134). Th e Sociable City is an act of recovery, a taut intellectual history dense with insights on the surfaces and depths of urban life. It is also, albeit more obliquely, a work of advocacy. Geographers attentive to just about any of the episodes constellated within will fi nd truly new ways to situate and debate the sense they made.