The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture, Interiors, Landscapes in the Golden Era
Frick Symington Sanger offers a 300-page addendum to her  biography of her great-grandfather, Henry Clay Frick: An  Intimate Portrait (LJ 10/1/98). Here she intersperses  biographical details exhaustively explored in her earlier book  with colorful and copious commentary on the family mansions and  their contents. The four houses examined, the foremost being the  Manhattan beaux-arts palace that now houses the Frick  collection, were produced by fashionable, academically trained  architects and decorators circa 1900, many of whom are the  subjects of a resurgence of interest in the wake of  Postmodernism. The author has a peculiar critical methodology;  she maintains that a vaguely defined pre-World War I period was  the "Golden Era" of the arts and that aesthetic choices are  somehow determined by deep-seated psychological processes.  Bypassing her pop psychology and superficial aesthetic analysis,  the reader will uncover an interesting portrayal of one of  America's wealthiest industrialists, his heirs, and their  extravagant homes. Plentiful photos and illustrations recommend  this book to comprehensive architecture and design  collections. David Solt sz, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OHCopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.