An extraordinary biography of an impossibly accomplished 19th-century American. Perhaps most famous for having designed New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822—1903) did much more over an astonishingly various career. In this thoughtful study by noted urbanologist Rybczynski (City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World, 1995, etc.), Olmsted emerges as a man without whose contributions America would have looked very different a century ago—and would look very different today. He was, writes Rybczynski, “an organizer when organization was considered a symptom of monomania and a long-range planner in a period that thought of planning as mysterious. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the US, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country’s first regional plans. Olmsted’s genius for organization was not always widely appreciated, for he often expressed it imperiously, as when he ordered Central Park’s rangers to complete a circuit of the park three times daily and to prepare detailed reports on their activities. Yet he accomplished great things, and Rybczynski reveals them one by one throughout the course of his always intriguing narrative: he worked as an antislavery journalist for the New-York Daily Times and as an editor for the Nation and Putnam’s Monthly magazine; wrote scores of books and book-length reports; and, most impressively of all, designed a large roster of public and private landscape projects, among them the Bay Area’s Mountain View Cemetery, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Montreal’s “Mountain,” portions of the Stanford University campus, the park surrounding Niagara Falls, the gardens surrounding North Carolina’s Biltmore Estate, and the grounds of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This abundantly varied career yielded an uncommonly rich legacy that is part of the nation’s vocabulary of shared images. Rybczynski is a fine writer and thinker, and this is a magisterial biography of a man who deserves the widest possible recognition. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82463-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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