I am one of the generation of New Yorkers that have grown up with the ghost of the old Penn station - and its unfortunate replacement. We have been forever robbed of this stately thing, which was so much more than a building. Watching it's slow death in these haunting pictures makes me hope this is the last time we have used our imagination to destroy rather than build. (This is an especially painful irony in light of our recent tragedy.) Get this book, and look at it with your children. And may we never treat the human-made beauty around us with such contempt again.

I remember as a kid in the mid-70s taking the train to NYC and having to endure the commuter's nightmare known as "modern" Penn Station.

In the late 80s, I learned what once was on the site of the current MSG/Penn Station monstrosity and became appalled that people could let a beautiful work of art be dismantled and replaced with a horrible building. In the early 1990s, I learned about the 1950s and 1960s and how Americans were obsessed with all things modern and new, rejecting anything with a hint of age or ornament.

Moore & Moore take a pictorial look on how the McKim, Mead and White's neoclassical masterpiece was dismantled over a multi-year period in the mid-1960s. While they really don't go into detail on why the old Penn Station was demolished, the spooky, B & W photos tell more than how an architectural gem was demolished. On a deeper level, the photos tell the tale of how an entire city was becoming irrelevant to suburban America and was sinking into massive decline (the years of municipal bankrupcy and burning neighborhoods in the South Bronx are only a few years away).

It was a very sad book that gets more depressing with each turn of the page, as more and more of the beauty of the old Penn Station gets stripped away. I guess that was the power of the photographs working on me.

Pair this book up with Robert Caro's _The Power Broker_ to get a good picture of New York in the early Baby Boom era.

This is an extraordinary, heartbreaking, must have book for anyone who loves New York and/or McKim, Mead & White's work.

Photographer Peter Moore and his wife Barbara moved into the Penn Station neighborhood in the early sixties. They used the building every day, whether they were passing through to the subway or catching a bite in the cavernous coffee shop.

With the railroad's permission, they documented its slow dismantling over the four years from 1963-1967. This book is the first appearance of that work. The black and white pictures are arranged chronologically, showing the faded but still magnificent station from its last days of active use through to its ghostly presence as a metal shell. The photography is beautiful and lyrical and sad beyond words, like a mournful love song to a love lost. The picures of the rubble-filled waiting room, its shape still intact but its side walls gone, are especially hard to take.

One note: this is not an exhaustive review of the building and its various spaces. It is a chrono picture of the concourse and waiting room through through their destruction. For more pics of the station in use, try "The Late, Great, Pennsylvania Station."

Mr. Nash's book is full of wonderful color photographs and an in depth chronicle of events in Frank Lloyd Wrights(FLLW) life. The book describes the hardships Wright endured, how he got his start, his turbulent and tragic personal life, his bold architectural philosophy, his defiance of contemorary styles, and much more. Anyone interested in FLLW should take a look at this book. It offers both a great starting point for those interested in learning about the architect and a great reference for those who already know about him.

I ordered this book after September 11th as a sort of timecapsule of the New York skyline and a historical record of the World Trade Center towers. The formatting of the book is nice, in chronological order by building, with equal background devoted to each building. There are wonderful pictures of every building, along with some building plans and surrounding area maps.

My biggest complaint is that this book devotes equal time to a lot of non-descript skyscrapers from the 1960's and 1970's that don't really add to the uniqueness of the NY skyline. Some of the architecture of that period is just drab and uninteresting. I would've liked to have seen more concentration on the earlier period of New York's building boom. I think more interior shots would round out this book. The book could also include at least another 50-75 buildings, which is why I don't feel that it's definitive.

That said, this is a nice book, well-formatted, which covers most of the landmark buildings in Manhattan, including the former World Trade Center towers and surrounding buildings.

This book pin pointed some of Manhattan's most noticable and famous skyscrapers. From early century to 2000 this book covers it all. It starts of with the best early buildings mainly near cityhall. Then continues to the towers of wall street, these are the big bold towers weve come to know in the financial district, from the equitable building that is the reason for new york zoning to 1 bankers trust and it's magnificant zuggarat roof. It's full of pictures and info you can't find anywhere else. The book gets more exciting as time progresses, mentioning towers from the Empire State building to the short beakman plaza it's all there. Modern towers are characterized magnificently, at first describing the landmarks such as the lever, seagram, and the U.N. to latter discussing Manhattan's Mega Skyscrapers such as U.S. Steel, G.M., Chase, and Metlife mentioning the sucesses and failures of each tower. At the end it describes the boom in timesquare and other new skyscrapers which escape the box. I read every page with great excitement and recommend it to everyone, it's full of info from an architect's and historians point of view

this book is very bad, it only covers 7.5 buildings! The only reason i'm giving it 5 stars is because it has more than 5 pages in it,and it has a pretty cover. he eh he he! This book is SO not good. heh eh eh he he heh!! I got tired of it right before i opened the stupid book! he h eh he he!! memorizing the dictionary would be more fun than even thinking about laying eyes on this dumb book!! HE HE HE HEHEH!!

Unable, or unwilling, to secure the cooperation of Adams' estate, the publishers of this book have used images from the US national archive.

These substandard images have been reproduced hair, dust and all! It's an insult to a man who spent his life teaching and promoting quality photography.

This book was done without the authorization of the Ansel Adams Photographic Trust, as was duly noted in the book.

The volume reproduces Ansel Adams' images in a way that badly distorts his style. Most of the images are so dark and over inked that all you can see are the outlines. Adams' work was all about light and using details to show connections among objects. The only benefit you will get from seeing these images is to realize why Adams insisted on such tight control over his work. You will also come to more fully appreciate his comments about how his "reality" depended on what happened with the print, not with the negative.

Miraculously, a few images were reproduced in wonderful fashion. But you have to look long and hard to find them. Don't bother. I suggest you stick with the authorized versions of his work instead, which are all published by Little Brown. The main flaws of those volumes is that Little Brown designed the books in many cases to make the images too small.

Why, then, did I assign this book two stars rather than one? Well, I rather liked the essay by Eric Peter Nash about Adams. Nash provides a good balance between writing a short biography of Adams as a person, his development as a photographer through using new techniques, and Adams' reflections on his contemporaries. The essay is much longer than in other books about Ansel Adams and added usefully to my knowledge about his photographic techniques.

My advice is to read the essay and consider it in the context of images in other books. I would suggest you avoid buying this book.

After you have finished reading the essay, I suggest you consider how your purposes might not be followed as you wish when you are no longer alive. For example, do you have any possessions that you would like to have given to a certain person or handled in a certain way? Do you have a will that provides for those events to take place? Do you have an executor of the will who understands your purposes and is likely to outlive you?

Pass on your insights with care!