Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.
Starred Review.To all those who have encountered the delights of driving in the  District of Columbia—and subsequently suffered the distress of getting lost  amid its oddly angled avenues—Berg (a teacher of nonfiction writing and  literature at George Mason University) offers a welcome narrative of the man  responsible: Pierre Charles L'Enfant. A French volunteer during the American  Revolution, L'Enfant was asked by George Washington in 1791 to design a  gleaming federal city, not on a hill but in a swamp. Suffering from constant  interference, not least by Thomas Jefferson, and a nasty episode of  credit-stealing by a rival surveyor, L'Enfant—something of an easily inflamed  control-freak himself—persisted for 11 months before being dismissed. Still,  his plan lived on, a monument to Enlightenment architectural principles and  plotted with geometric regularity. Washington, D.C., as conceived by L'Enfant,  would be the republican antithesis to the medieval, dirty warren of Paris; it  would be a polis where the people's Congress would form the city's nexus—and  what would become the White House was pointedly set off to the side. Berg  performs sterling service in excavating this little-known story from the  archives. Every tourist to the nation's capital, and every driver within it,  will enjoy the ride. B&w illus., maps.(Feb.  13)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.