Central Park, an American masterpiece /

Miller's attractively priced book is more than a handsome and worthy commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the US's most familiar designed landscape. It marshals pictures and text to support the assertion that this is "the most important work of American art in the nineteenth century." The pictures include more than 200 of the author's beautiful photographs, most in color and all beautifully reproduced, and about 50 early photos and reproductions of the few surviving original competition entries. The too-short text recapitulates familiar material, provides important new historical and interpretive material, and presents a lucid guide to the park's gates, areas, structures, and sculpture. Scanty is information about the park's flora, details of the park's recent and ongoing restoration and maintenance programs, and assessments of unwelcome intrusions forced into the park over time. Critical apparatus in the endnotes and bibliography, both supplemented by additional material in a Web site, and a preface complete the publication. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through professionals. C. W. Westfall University of Notre Dame

Miller is the park's official historian and photographer, and her authority shows, revealing some new facets to this most overexposed of urban spaces. Original plans and drawings (many published for the first time) sit alongside modern-day photographs among the more than 200 color illustrations, creating a sense of the history that underlies this man-made urban landscape. Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the park's designers (the other was Calvert Vaux), saw his plan as a balm to soothe the roiling city's ills. Miller finds him remarking that the park "exercises a distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the most lawless classes of the city-an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance." Bethesda Terrace was Vaux's ideological baby and, according to Miller, was influenced by the work of John Ruskin, Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Cole. Kenneth T. Jackson, president of the New-York Historical Society, writes in his preface that Central Park is not the oldest public open space in either the world or the United States, nor is it the largest, nor even the most beautiful, yet it has the most contrast to its surroundings, an expression of a city's life and exuberance, and is properly celebrated as such by Miller. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Central Park, this elegant volume is a fitting tribute to the first American public park and what may be the most beautiful park in the world. Miller, photographer and historian of the Central Park Conservancy, handles the myriad facets of this green oasis with a sure hand and an artist's eye. Archival materials and current research inform the work, which deals with the image of the park as a 19th-century artwork, a landscape painting, a sculptural monument, and a gardener's delight. The reader is guided through the park from the entry gates to the Bethesda Terrace, from the meadows to the wilderness of the Ramble. Around every corner is a wonder of texture and color, subtlety and flamboyance, exuberance and restraint. The major sculptures and detailed carvings are revealed along with the small architectural jewels of follies and bridges. This is a work for New Yorker and tourist, historian and artist, bird watcher and gardener. Highly recommended for any and all libraries-and for personal bookshelves as well.-Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.