Hey look it’s galleys! If you’re a member of the press or would like to write about The Man in the Glass House, let me know. But here’s what some very bright people are already saying about it:
“I once considered writing a novel based on the life of Philip Johnson. Mark Lamster’s excellent biography reminds me why: The Man In the Glass House is a vivid, thoughtful, illuminating, disturbing and definitive chronicle of one of 20th century architecture’s most celebrated and powerful figures.“
– Kurt Andersen, author & host of NPR’s Studio 360
“Mark Lamster thoughtfully teases out the real history of this modernist icon, from his impressive sexual appetites and more-than-flirtation with fascism in Hitler’s Germany to his 1990s collaboration with Donald Trump. It’s clear that Johnson was a fascinating and disturbing figure; Lamster’s biography, impressively and honestly, displays him with his full complexity.”
– Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
“More than a dozen years after his death, Philip Johnson remains a perplexing, polarizing, magnetic and frustrating figure: although he was far from our greatest architect, no one did more to shape our architectural culture. In this compelling biography, Mark Lamster deconstructs Johnson’s complex persona, evaluates his work and begins the process of establishing his place in history.”
– Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize winning critic and author of Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
“Philip Johnson led many lives – as curator, aspiring demagogue with a Third Reich fixation, modernist architect, winking post-modernist, and finally kingmaker in the profession – and Mark Lamster has masterfully woven them together in a biography that is as much literary as critical achievement. Required reading for anyone hoping to make sense of the American century, for Johnson was its house architect.”
– Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles and former architecture critic, Los Angeles Times
“The Man in the Glass House captures the essence of a prodigious, multivalent, enigmatic American talent with authority and aplomb. It’s a biography with attitude, a bullet train through the shifting landscapes of 20th century architecture, and a sheer pleasure to read.
– Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and You May Also Like: Taste in An Age of Endless Choice
“Philip Johnson was as complicated and contradictory as the American century that created him and which he helped define. Modernist, reactionary, anti-Semite, populist, artist and commercial powerhouse, he lived, in some sense, to contradict himself. In Mark Lamster’s nuanced telling, Johnson becomes more than the man in the round glasses, or the avatar of modernism; he becomes a symbol of America itself. This is biography as history, and it is a magnificent piece of work.”
– David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles