Whether flying a kite in Franklin Park, gardening in the Fens, or jogging along the Riverway, today’s Bostonians are greatly indebted to the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted. The man who dreamed of an “emerald necklace” of parks for Boston completed his plans in 1895, yet his invigorating influence shapes the city to this day, despite the encroachment of highways and urban sprawl. Cynthia Zaitzevsky’s book is the first fully illustrated account of Olmsted’s work: the process of “getting the plan” of a park, supervising its construction, adding the necessary “furniture” of bridges and other structures, and selecting plants, shrubs, and trees.

Frederick Law Olmsted’s stellar career in landscape architecture began with his design for Central Park in New York City. Public concern for open spaces led Boston to commission Olmsted to design peaceful “country parks” for the mental and physical refreshment of those who lived in the expanding city. He planned the system of five parks and connecting parkways extending out from the original Boston Common and Public Garden, as well as harbor and riverfront improvements—a vast set of projects involving 2,000 acres of open land. He and his firm also designed many smaller parks, playgrounds, and suburban subdivisions.

This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in landscape architecture, city planning, the history of Boston, or the nineteenth-century urban park movement and its current revival.

Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life.

The diary became a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer, by turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical. But the diary is also an uninhibited history of his times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. Inman’s explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others. Like some ghostly doctor-priest, he chronicled their outpourings of head and heart as vividly as he did his own. The diary reads like a nonfiction novel as it moves inexorably toward disaster.

This is an abridged version of the celebrated two-volume work published by Harvard as The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession.

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.

First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.