PositiveThe New York Review of Books...[a] searing yet judicious new biography ... [a previous] biography provided a seemingly complete roster of Johnson’s romantic involvements, though Lamster comes up with yet another major affair previously unrecorded, as well as other less-enduring liaisons. But of far more interest and importance than the architect’s love life is the previously unrevealed extent of his involvement with Nazi Germany ... Lamster goes further than any previous writer in asserting that Johnson was infinitely worse than a misguided, impressionable youth who fell for Hitlerian theatrics: he was in effect an unpaid spy for the Nazi regime ... Although the subtitle of Lamster’s insightful investigation might at first seem like marketing overreach, there is little question that Johnson, if scarcely his celebrity-worshiping epoch’s finest architect, was perhaps its most representative one ... [Johnson] was no different from the current president of the United States, and the business connections between the two have given Lamster a final chapter more grotesque than even his darkly cynical subject could have predicted.
