Frederick Law Olmstead is a fascinating character and an inspiration to all those who take a long time to find their direction in life. After a somewhat haphazard education, he travelled widely and made forays into farming and writing. All his various experiences helped him in finally finding his vocation as a landscape architect, or more precisely as a designer of national parks. Inspired by the public gardens he had seen in England, Olmstead pioneered the concept of the public park in North America. Among the designs he worked on are Central Park in New York, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the grounds of Stanford University, and those surrounding the Capitol in Washington D.C.

Rybczynski, a former professor of architecture at McGill and current professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced several distinguished books on urban living and buildings, including City Life and The Most Beautiful House in the World. Here he combines his area of expertise with biography. He attempts the novelistic writing that characterizes good biography by inserting quasi-fictional vignettes into his narrative.While these do illuminate certain episodes very imaginatively, Rybczynski is more successful at depicting the backdrop of the times than he is in shaping and dramatizing his subject’s life story. There is too much detail of the politics and conflicts surrounding Olmstead’s projects for this book to have great appeal to the general reader.