The brilliant landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted is famous for designing Central Park, but he worked elsewhere in 19th-century America, too. Locally, he laid out the vision for Milwaukee's beautiful Lake Park. As chronicled in Justin Martin's biography, Olmsted led a varied life, sometimes under difficult circumstances. Central Park remains his greatest accomplishment—a fantasy created from an unpromising patch of ground and dedicated to the belief that every person, not just the rich, should enjoy access to the beauty of nature. Olmsted was a jack-of-all-trades whose hands-on knowledge brought him to places where narrow specialists might never have gone. (David Luhrssen)
