Customer Reviews

Washington Album: A Pictorial History of the Nation's Capital

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The information and pictures in this book are offered randomly and leave readers with a number of unanswered questions. The book is neither a coffee table pictorial nor a well-researched account on the nation's capital. Even though it presents some scattered information, nothing is systematic. When someone picks a book on the history of a certain city, she or he would like to learn about where the name of the city and its areas came from, what landmarks still stand today, what the stories behind them are and so on. Instead, this book pastes some random pictures and comments on them. At times, it does not even offer such commentary. I learnt a lot more about the history of Washington DC from Wikepedia than from this book. I certainly do not recommend it.

Regardless of whether you were a fan of Bob Levey's Washington Post column, you will find this book to be an excellent overview of the history of the nation's capital. Washington was sometimes a backwater or sometimes a laboratory where Congress tested out ideas of how to organize a city or a society. The icing on the cake is the pictures, unusual and interesting photos, paintings, drawings, and more that reveal daily life in a very American place.

Bob Levey claims to care deeply about good writing. But he ignores Strunk and White's admonition that the writer should always keep himself in the background. Indeed, Flaubert once said that the writer "must be like God on the page, present everywhere yet visible nowhere." Unfortunately, Levey inserts himself into nearly every one of the chapters (as he does in his insipid Washington Post columns), when it is clear the book would have been decent if he had stayed out of it.

This book does have some scarce nuggets. The history of Washington is indeed riveting, but not because of any pedestrian rendering by Levey. Unfortunately, Levey is not qualified to handle the material, and the reader is left only to speculate about how good this book could have been in the hands of a more talented writer.

The great thing about this book is the community background Bob Levey brings to it. So often Washington DC is thought of as "The Nation's Capital". But we're also a city - with our own interests, our own sources of pride, our own traditions, our own history. That fact comes through in this book! I definitely recommend it.