A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century

by Witold Rybczynski

Book Overview

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man 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, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's Riverside...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684824639
• ISBN13: 9780684824635
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A beautiful book about a remarkable man

This book strikes a lovely balance between describing Olmsted's life and personal history and his creations, parks that span the United States.You may be surprised to learn, as I was, the vast number of projects he undertook. How Central Park was really his first significant project. How he had to fight political and economic battles to keep it from being ruined. How he was able to truly "get it right" with Brooklyn's Prospect Park.Through the fascinating descriptions of the landscapes, the author also provides great insight into Olmsted's life. What struck me the most was how Olmsted, as with many of his contemporaries (U.S. Grant, Mark Twain) worried for most of his life about his finances and his career.This is a first rate work, told in a clear and compelling fashion.

An Informative Introduction To An American Innovator

To me, a biography is successful if the author conveys both the subject's accomplishments and the influences that helped to shape these deeds. Rybczynski easily meets these standards in this entertaining, instructive study.Rybczynski spends a lot of time discussing the significance of Olmsted's major projects, like Prospect Park and Mount Royal. The innovations that Olmsted brought to the field of landscape architecture in these projects are clearly laid out for the reader. However, these discussions were not the main point that I took from the book. Instead, I was enthralled with the discussions of the various jobs and travels that Olmsted undertook throughout his life, particularly in his formative years. Rybczynski does an excellent job of showing that these diverse experiences not only satiated Olmsted's curiosity, but also were essential to the development of Olmsted's views on landscape architecture. It is refreshing to find an example of the belief that a variety of experiences are necessary to bring out new talents, enhance existing skills, and create a well-rounded individual. I highly recommend A Clearing In The Distance for many reasons. These reasons include a concise writing style and a multi-faceted subject. But, above all, the book brings attention to an individual deserving of such study. It is this quality that makes A Clearing In The Distance a "must-read" for not only admirers of Olmsted's works, but for anyone who is interested in the creative development of an innovator in their field.

how'd that park get there in the first place?

If I told you that I've just read an excellent biographical memoir about an American original where the author is a looming presence and sections of the book, which masquerade as primary resource material, are actually fabricated by the biographer, you would probably assume that I'd broken down and bought the Edmund Morris book, Dutch. In fact, Witold Rybczynski's biography of the great American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), includes imagined thoughts and dialogue that the author himself crafted. As he told Brian Lamb on Booknotes, he doesn't much like docudramas but found the technique could be valuable. Indeed, the author is a character in the book, sharing his opinions and walking through Olmsted's parks, sharing his observations.I mention this, not because it takes away from the book, but because they are fairly typical techniques. Actually, the biographer is a presence in virtually every biography, starting with the choice of whom to write about, but then continuing with the editorial judgments about how to play incidents and what to put in and leave out. If authors like Morris and Rybczynski are more open about it than most, more power to them.Meanwhile, Rybczynski's subject here, in addition to designing and building Central Park, Prospect Park, etc., was also a sailor, farmer, journalist, founder of The Nation, author of several still pertinent books on the functioning of slavery in the South, and remained throughout his life an honest and honorable public servant. The author tells his story well and offers one important theme of Olmsted's work that retains its relevance. Olmsted, whom we perceive as a naturalist and environmentalist, believed that wilderness, open spaces and nature itself should serve humans. We look on Central Park today and mistaken think of it as a preserved piece of nature in the midst of development. Actually, the only part of the Park that remains unchanged may be the granite outcroppings that helped make the land cheap. He truly built parks and he did so in order that they might serve as restorative or recuperative sanctuaries for modern man.This is a very interesting book and it is particularly useful as a counter balance to Robert Caro's great biography of Robert Moses (The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York). Caro makes a pretty convincing case that Moses ended up using his enormous powers to impose his own will on the geography of New York, regardless of the impact on the human beings living there. Olmsted, on the other hand, remained reticent about using his power and always built with the ultimate users in mind. He emerges as a great American visionary and a really admirable figure.GRADE: A-

a big life in a small book

Witold Rybczynski has made Frederick Law Olmsted's life look a little easier than it must have been. This is largely caused by the laminar flow of Rybczynski's prose. We are swept through the 19th century so smoothly that even the Civil War seems like a mere rock in the stream. I have not read any of the author's other books, but his prose style here seemed to be imitating the sweeping lines in an Olmsted design. In terse introductory paragraphs the broader events of a given historical period are sketched out and then Olmsteds trajectory through them is presented in more, but not great, detail. The result of this approach is to make the reader feel both informed and curious to know more. As other reviewers have remarked and the author points out in his closing chapter, much is available. Olmsted was a pack rat who saved all his correspondence and his legacy was carried on into the middle 20th century by his son Rick, who only retired from practice in 1950.I grew up near New York City and always considered Central Park to be a wonderful place, even in its worst times through the 60s and 70s. I am lucky enough now to live in a city with three Olmsted-designed parks (they were initiated by the old man, but designed and built by his sons). Their maintenance has been spotty, but they are still beautiful places, and I do wonder if they still have the power to civilize.

Highly Recommended

The best single piece of advice a teacher can give to a budding scholar is this: Go to the original source! On the other hand, a thorough and well-integrated biography can profitably lead one to seek the original data. In this new biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, author Witold Rybczynski creates a portrait of Olmsted few could glean from even a careful perusal of the Olmsted archives. Rybczynski traces Olmsted's life, allotting equal emphasis to Olmsted's peregrinating early career, one that meandered aimlessly through seemingly incompatible by-ways yet almost predictably emerging with him as a pioneer landscape architect.  Olmsted's career, starting in 1858 with the design of Central Park in New York City, resulted in an astounding achievement nationally, only recently being generally appreciated. New Yorkers and Brooklynites were only the early beneficiaries of his genius. Though Rybczynski credits the series, a serious reader must turn to the original materials available in the magnificent series, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (Johns Hopkins Press). Projected for twelve volumes, seven are now published, with an auxiliary companion volume to volume one. Additionally, there has grown up a large corpus of works about Olmsted. This new biography is a first-rate addition and a fitting place to begin a study. (Reviewed by Allan Shields in Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol 15 No 2, Winter 1999-2000. Copyright © by Allan Shields.)