A Clearing in the Distance: Frederich Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century - Softcover

Rybczynski, Witold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684865750 ISBN 13: 9780684865751

Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD, 2000

Synopsis

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Now I Sit Me Down, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes--among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

About this title

Product Description:

Title: A Clearing in the Distance( Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century) <>Binding: Paperback <>Author: WitoldRybczynski <>Publisher: ScribnerBookCompany

Review:

Suzannah Lessard The New York Times Book Review Excellent...thorough and respectful, yet easeful in a way that is reminiscent of Olmsted himself.

Stanley Weintraub The Wall Street Journal Mr. Rybczynski meshes what is close to a history of urban landscape architecture in America in the nineteenth century with a life of Olmsted. By doing so, he has produced a biography that communicates, with feeling, the ups and downs of Olmsted's career as well as of the profession he helped to invent....A book that defines and evokes Olmsted as an American original.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684865750
• ISBN 13: 9780684865751
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480