MixedThe Washington Post... a curiously obsessive quality, returning again and again not just to the events of 1914 but to other fires that bedeviled Wright’s career. Hendrickson is a dogged researcher and pursues every lead ... a curious and at times exhausting book. Few subjects in American architecture have been more thoroughly studied than Wright ... Hendrickson’s efforts to turn new ground are sporadically successful. He writes sensitively about Wright’s emotional life ... At the bottom of all of this is a Gothic sense of almost supernatural threads tying the architect’s personal life to larger, more sinister forces of history...Sometimes, however, the author’s tangents are merely tangential, and he often finishes following a dead end with a cavalier dismissal...These dead ends pile up, as does the minutiae about clients and the children of clients...This is maddening after a while. So too the prose style, which is what journalists would call \'muscular,\' teeming with sentence fragments, sentences without verbs, forced colloquialisms, and a tendency to throw out a statement and then retract it, as if we’re following the author as he improvises his text. Also, he likes to throw in \'damn\' as an all-purpose intensifier ... At some point, the author’s deft use of local color becomes merely clutter, and the reader wishes a 600-page book had been trimmed to about 300. If one cut the speculation and digressions, that could probably be reduced to about 150 pages. But at their best, those pages are, well, damn good.
Wendy Lesser
PositiveThe Washington PostShe builds her narrative not just on existing accounts and archival research, but on extensive interviews with Kahn’s family, friends and professional colleagues, and while she doesn’t let Kahn off the hook, she doesn’t indict him either. The results are refreshing ... Lesser is more interested in fleshing out the interpersonal and emotional milieu in which Kahn operated than she is in a conventional account of his development and career ... The writing tends to the lyrical rather than the analytical, and her descriptions of buildings are stronger on phenomenology than the details of construction and engineering ... What Lesser adds to the Kahn narrative isn’t simply a pragmatic understanding of his personal life. She allows the women in his life to emerge as far more than mere satellites to a great male ego ... The success of this biography lies in the author’s fundamental acceptance of the messiness of human life.
Ross King
PositiveThe Washington Post...a well-researched and in-depth account ... Unfortunately, as a narrative armature, the creation of Monet’s Grande Decoration isn’t sufficient to merit this 400-page account. King compensates with long digressions, many of them fascinating, into the larger social and political backstory. Of that, there is plenty ... The friendship with Clemenceau — who is one of the most colorful characters of any age — is the reader’s happiest reward in this book.
