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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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