A Clearing in the Distance - by Witold Rybczynski (Paperback)

About the Book

Frederick Law Olmsted's priceless contributions to the American landscape include New York City's Central Park, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. This book offers a look at Olmsted's other accomplishments, including his advocacy of abolition and his impact as a journalist and founder of "The Nation". of photos.

Book 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.

Review Quotes

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.

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