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Rating: 
Summary: Extraordinary!
Review: Allen Weiss brilliantly illuminates five centuries of landscape architecture with Unnatural Horizons. This incredible work explores the relations between garden aesthetics and the metaphysical realm. Weiss situates himself at the symbolic matrix of landscape perspective -the place where poetics and science, natural beauty and art, politics and philosophy collide. The writing is excellent and flow of language exquisite. Unnatural Horizons is a tremendous work which provokes and endears. Highly recommended! A wonderful companion piece to his classic work -Mirrors of Infinity.
Rating: 
Summary: Academic Hallucinations Obfuscate Erudition
Review: Professor Weiss has mastered new levels of obfuscation with his absurd and excruciating academic prose. And he wins the 1998 Academic Cliché Award for wanton overuse of the word "paradigm." There may well be some impressive erudition behind all this pedantic hoo-ha, God knows he quotes everyone from the Renaissance forward, unfortunately the reader has to confront an almost impenetrable barrier of garbled literary theory presented here as scholarly thinking. E.g., a random quotation from the text: "Consideration of cuisine holds surprising revelations for the history of landscape architecture...Provocative as this statement might be, this assimilation of cuisine to architecture nevertheless only confuses the issue, obfuscating the material specificity of cuisine and delaying its aesthetic liberation." As one of the reviewers on the back cover of the book says, this book is "almost hallucinatory."
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