William Price is indeed an overlooked architect. While I'm hesistant to call him a genius, his work has a breadth seldom seen in the work of his contemporaries. He was one of the last of the Philadelphia architects to come from a background of manual training rather than an academic background, but clearly he was able to apply the lessons of contemporary practice learned from books, and stretch into new areas of the Arts and Crafts movement and advanced design in reinforced concrete.

The author spends an inordinate amount of time in the book describing how Philadelphia, with a strong heritage of innovative industrial design is left behind in the architectural world due to an academic bias of the press based in New York and Boston. While this is important to Price's reputation, it has little to do with his actual work. The prose in the book is repititious, reading as a series of loosely related lectures rather than a single thesis, and the book design does not help the reader.

The illustrations, largely drawn from the firm's archive now held by the author, are very well produced, but could have been supplemented by more new photography. A significant number of Price's buildings do survive, and color photography would bring out the great qualities of material, color, and texture that were so important to his work.

In summary, a book on Price was long overdue, but one would have hoped that it would focus more on the great qualities of his architecture.

It may not be right to critize the book, however, since the author allowed his work to be used in making the IMAX movie that is shown hourly ajacent to the Alamo he must bear the responsibility for the appaling movie that reflects his work.

Disjointed and inaccurate are the kindest words to use. The movie script has actions taking place out of sequence and worst of all it contains so many omissions as to make it almost a parody of the heroic stand of the Texicans against Santa Anna. The glaring omissions and literary license taken with known facts make this work easily the worst treatsie on the Alamo ever.

Mr. McAlister should have stood on his head to make sure it was at least historically accurate as far as known facts and it would not have cost a dime to have a voice over narration to fill in the many omissions in the Alamo story. There are too many for me to list here but it should suffice to say "shame" on you for allowing such a travesty to parade ! under the guise of purporting to tell the story of the Alamo. Even John Wayne's script was better!!!!! (Wayne's was the worst script ever used for a movie.)