Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000

Rating:
Summary: Avoid this edition
Review: Having read reviews of Shand-Tucci's biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, I approached this book with wariness; many readers of that book complained that Shand-Tucci's prose was simply unbearable. However, throughout much of this book, I was pleasantly surprised. The prose, while not quite a joy to read, was at least passable, if little more than workmanlike. I enjoyed learning about H.H. Richardson and Ralph Adams Cram, and the text was liberally peppered with relevant photographs.

And then I came to the Expanded portion of this Revised and Expanded book. What a disaster. Perhaps Shand-Tucci has lost his touch, all sense of moderation and discernment in constructing a sentence. Perhaps his subjects are to blame; even the best architecture critic would find it daunting to say anything useful about Renzo Piano's nondesign for a Harvard museum on the Charles River. (Shand-Tucci's attempt boils down to: "was ever line so elegant?" [P. 395.]) Or perhaps UMass Press forgot to copy-edit his added text. Whereas the author mentions the editors at Little, Brown who "so ably labored" the first edition of this book, the Expanded portions are rife with errors, including obvious spacing problems that would have been noticed had anyone bothered to read it before sending it off to the printer.

Whatever the cause, at times the commentary near the end of the book is just painful. Here's what he says about the New Chardon Courthouse in Government Center. It starts out reasonable enough, but quickly disintegrates into pure drivel, and poorly-written drivel at that: "It resonates equally, for one thing, with the early-nineteenth-century era of Boston's New World Greek Revival temple architecture (all that robustly rusticated and bright, becolumned limestone façade cladding) and the twenty-first-century era of the space station, the rims of which (do space stations have rims?) will never be more knife-edge sharp than the great space-age cornice that flares out from the top of this courthouse." (P. 356.) What on God's green earth could he mean by including that space station parenthetical?

My advice: buy a used copy of the first edition of this book. Save yourself the headaches induced by this Enlarged edition, and save yourself some money to boot.