Swim against the Current or The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Swim against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow

Author: Jim Hightower

Pssssst! Bookstore browsers!

Don't look around, but the corporate and political powers that be want you to put this book down, right now. It definitely is NOT on their approved list.

Swim against the Current is one of those books that the power elites don't like seeing in stores, much less in your hands—not merely because it challenges their established order, but especially because our book reveals paths that folks like you can use to escape their rigid, hierarchical structures and discover a bit more satisfaction in life.

They prefer that you pick up one of those escapist novels over there across the store, rather than finding out that the greatest escape of all can be from stultifying conventional wisdom. We Americans are constantly harassed into thinking that we can't break the mold that those in charge have made for us. But as a friend of ours puts it: "Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

It's the uplifting stories of mavericks that we tell here. They've broken free of the corporate tentacles, free of business-as-usual politics, free of top-down elites. They're figuring out new ways to do commerce, ways to create political channels that empower grassroots Americans, and ways to live their lives.

As these folks show, resistance is not futile . . . it's fertile. Join the fun! Happy reading!

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
Business     5
Business without Greed     7
Fair Trade     14
Cooperation Works     19
Socially Responsible     29
Putting Workers in Charge     42
The Good (Business) Life     51
Banking on Change     58
Connections for Part One     66
Politics     73
Shape Up, America!     75
Run for It!     83
Clean Elections     92
Democracy School     105
Build It!     111
Granny Power     122
The Politics of Fun     127
Connections for Part Two     134
Life     139
Take Charge!     141
How We Live     151
A Mass Movement Arises     158
Flowers in the Field     164
The Conscience of an Evangelical     176
Connections for Part Three     188
Final Thoughts     193
DeMarco's Reading List     197
Index     201

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

Author: Jane Jacobs

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

What People Are Saying

Jane Jacobs
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon.... Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.