A Clearing In The Distance Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author ofHomeandCity Life,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 cofoundedThe Nationmagazine 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. InA Clearing in the Distance,the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Witold Rybczynski is the author of eight books, including Home: The Short History of an Idea, Waiting for the Weekend, and City Life. The Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, he is a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books.