American architecture...books...are often eye-candy, confected by journalists without analysis or insight. An occasional exception is a real work of history such as Harold Kirker's The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch...Kirker's scholarly effort provides the essential ground-work for an understanding of how American architecture has developed. Through Bulfinch (1763-1844) we can see how an American-born architect dealt with his British legacy.
-- Anthony Alofsin Times Literary Supplement

The photographs of surviving Bulfinch buildings by David Hayes...are excellent...This is a useful and highly welcome study that contains nearly everything that we are likely to be able to know, short of a miracle, about the architecture of Charles Bulfinch.
-- New England Quarterly

The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch is the result of meticulous historical research, and Kirker deserves praise for having dug up and organized a great deal of information in a most handsome, well-illustrated [book]...[It] will supplant all previous studies as the basic work on Bulfinch.
-- Technology and Culture

Bulfinch, who changed from gentleman-architect to professional because of economic necessity, had a long and important life in both the official and the private architectural annals of the early years of our country. The professional side of that life is here set forth with admirable clarity.
-- Virginia Quarterly Review