A Clearing in the Distance – Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century, by Witold Rybczynski (Scribner 1999), illuminates the life and career of Frederick Law Olmsted, a forerunner of American landscape architecture.
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.
– Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance – Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner, 1999), excerpt from the book description
The text is in English. The book is illustrated with some black-and-white photographs and some plans of Olmsted’s designs.
Our copy is in good condition. The pages are clean; no markings except for the previous owner’s small tag on the first flyleaf. The glueing of the binding is firm. The covers show some minor traces of shelf wear and use.
