To be perfectly honest, I had a hard time getting through this book. It's at times quite dense with highly specialized language and at other times, repetitive and dry. But I loved how concerted and passionate the arguments were in tone, and how detailed and studious they were in content.

Everything caught me by surprise. The arguments I thought would be there, about parks and neighborhoods and walkability and cars, were mostly turned on their heads, ensuring at every turn that the reader was anchored in discussion of these matters to the principle criteria making up "city diversity," or a tight-knit, interdependent mixture of uses. This book is worth making it through for the study in nuance alone. It will make you rethink what's good and bad about the parts of cities you like and dislike.

My least favorite part was Jacobs' tendency to something like New York exceptionalism. It's no issue that she wrote primarily about the city and neighborhood she knew and lived; the problem was that when she did have things to say about other cities, they were mostly negative. Few places other than the West Village of New York seemed to provide her with functional models to study.

My most favorite part was the last chapter, in which she quotes extensively from Warren Weaver's "Science and Complexity" and discusses how cities might be considered such, as well as schools of thought we need for reasoning about it. If you can't make it through the entirety of this book, I highly recommend at least reading this one chapter.