"... a huge number of Torontonians have no cultural memory of debates and battles and delightful pleasures that have vanished from the city's landscape. Neither do they recall dragons slain, like the Spadina Expressway. Unless we keep the memory alive, person to person, neighbour to neighbour.

'Cultures live through word of mouth and example,' the 88-year-old Jacobs writes in Dark Age Ahead, her seventh book. 'Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted neither in writing nor pictorially.'

Families are the instruments, the conduit. So, too, are our schools and institutions, bolstered by elected representatives. Our great minds and scientists are supposed to help perpetuate the culture through rigorous inquiry and experimentation and innovation.

But these 'pillars' of Western culture are under deep stress -- so much so that Jacobs feels she must blow the whistle on the gloomy future awaiting us if we don't wake up.

'This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book,' says the first line of Dark Age. Jacobs explains during an interview: 'I don't think we've reached one of those terrible points of no return. We've been doing a lot of things wrong, and this is a kind of wake-up call.'"

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