Built in Boston: City & Suburb, 1800-2000 [Paperback]

Douglass Shand-Tucci (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; Rev Exp Su edition (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558492011
• ISBN-13: 978-1558492011
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,554,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Historian and author Douglass Shand-Tucci, the Harvard-educated independent scholar, is founder of the extraordinary new history site (www.backbayhistorical.org) dedicated to Boston-Centric Global Studies | Art and Architecture; Literary, Cultural and Intellectual History. His latest work -- "Gods of Copley Square", "Barack Obama's Emerson", "Heroic: 1960s Concrete Architecture", "Idealist Bigots", is now regularly published on this site in his eScholarship column.

Shand-Tucci's most recent book ("magisterial"-- London's William Morris Gallery director Peter Cormack) is the second volume of his study of the American architect Ralph Adams Cram (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005) the first volume of which, "Boston Bohemia", ("brilliant, historic, profoundly relevent scholarship -- Harvard professor Peter Gomes) was published by the same press in 1994. His classic "Built in Boston" is also published in its latest edition by Massachusetts (2001).

"The Art of Scandal", Shand-Tucci's "intimate and engrossing biography" (The New Yorker) of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (HarperCollins, 1997) was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and as a Critic's Choice on the Times's Best Seller's page. In a different vein is Shand-Tucci's "Harvard University" (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) with an introduction by Harvard president Neil Rudenstine.

"The Crimson Letter", meanwhile, (St. Martin's, 2003), following on the Boston gay history theme of "Boston Bohemia", has also helped in the shaping of recent T. S. Eliot scholarship. In the Times of London Sir William Rees Mogg compared "The Crimson Letter" favorably to "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand.

Douglass Shand-Tucci lives in Boston's Back Bay, where the learned flow is sometimes interrupted by provocative reviews and comment. He has taught at Harvard, where he was Senior Affiliate in the History of Architecture in Eliot House, and at MIT and is now on the faculty of the Boston Architectural College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Avoid this edition, January 15, 2005

By 

jrp (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Built in Boston: City & Suburb, 1800-2000 (Paperback)

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.