PanThe New York Times Book ReviewAbout Wright’s architecture, Hendrickson offers little insight, none of it original. His mission, rather, is to re-evaluate Wright as a person. Hendrickson, who unabashedly inserts himself with poetically construed dear reader whispers into his narrative, confesses that his is a hunt for Wright’s \'humanity\' ... Let’s get one thing straight. Wright was a cad. Even fervent champions of his architecture acknowledge that. Prudently, Hendrickson concedes the point ... Hendrickson wishes to establish Wright’s \'fundamental decency as a person.\' He tilts at this windmill with formidable energy and considerable literary imagination, with an earnestness at once lavish and puzzling ... So: Wright suffered tragedies, felt affection and felt pain, and treated a few people decently. Ergo, he was a man of deep humanity. That’s Hendrickson’s position. Not enough to revolutionize, not enough even to alter, our understanding of the man ... In florid prose, Hendrickson recounts countless episodes tangential to Wright’s life or work, meandering onto all manner of occasionally interesting terrain ... would be simply forgettable if Hendrickson weren’t perpetuating a romantic mythology of artistic genius that is at once tiresome, simplistic, long past its expiration date and wrong. Wright was an imaginative innovator and occasionally an excellent architect, but that doesn’t transform a scoundrel into a tortured genius, let alone a sympathetic character ... In the end, what matters is not the life but the work: its vision, its execution, its lessons, its relevance to the way we do and might live. But none of that is Paul Hendrickson’s concern.
