An absorbing and informative history from a significant historian/biographer.
The engaging lives of two American visionaries.
In a vivid, deeply researched dual biography, Howard, a historian of architecture and design, pays homage to two men who exerted a huge influence on America’s homes, parks, and public spaces: landscape designer and environmentalist Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886). The men, who became collaborators, friends, and neighbors, could not have been more different. The ebullient Richardson, the son of a wealthy Southern mercantile family, was brilliant, handsome, and privileged. A grandson of naturalist Joseph Priestly, he went to Harvard, and when he decided to enter the relatively new profession of architecture, he enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he embarked on a productive apprenticeship. Olmsted, quieter and reserved, had been prevented from going to college because of an eye problem; after working at several jobs, he thought he might become a farmer. During a trip abroad in the early 1850s, however, he was inspired by Europe’s public parks to stand for election as superintendent of Central Park in Manhattan—a project that earned him accolades. The Civil War changed both men’s lives. Louisiana-born Richardson faced financial straits; Olmsted headed the Army’s Sanitary Commission and, after the war, worked for a mining company in California, where he obtained a commission to design what would become Berkeley, including the University of California campus. Howard details their many collaborative projects, including the Albany Capitol, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, and many private estates. Olmsted designed Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as well as other parks across the country. Richardson was the acclaimed architect for Boston’s Brattle Square Church and Trinity Church as well as for his innovative open-plan homes. Howard chronicles their family lives and health problems as well as their creative work, illustrated with period photographs. As he did in Architecture's Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson, the author brings the architectural world to life on the page.
An absorbing and informative history from a significant historian/biographer.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5923-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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