So....I picked up Stanford White: Letters to His Family by Claire Nicholas White (ed) primarily because it had the all-important word "white" in the title and I seem to have a difficult time finding "white" books to read for my Color-Coded Challenge. Also, it was one of the shorter "white" books available and I was hoping for a quick read. White was a fairly well-known American architect who was a member of the firm which designed a fair number of NYC buildings. There's not a lot to say about this.... It was a very nice idea--Lawrence Grant White, the son of Stanford White, had gathered up these letters which were written by his father from the age of 10 to the last letter written one month before his death in 1906. Lawrence had mounted them in beautiful leather-bound
books, each impetuously scribbled letter accompanied by a typewritten
transcription. It was so obviously the labor of love and admiration of a
son for his father that this alone made them precious. {This also makes this an ideal book to submit for the A-Z Book Challenge Mini-Challenge--read a book with a father-figure}. But I can't say that I found the letters all that interesting.
And it's not that I don't like books made up of a collection of letters. The various collections of the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers are marvelous. I loved the reading the correspondence of Katherine Anne Porter. But these women were writers. Maybe that's what makes the difference. White was an architect and didn't seem to be an inspired letter-writer. He spends a lot of time explaining why he hasn't written. Or explaining that he has, but it's not very good. There were moments--brief, fleeting moments--when Stanford White would send a letter home from France to his mother, or a missive from his travels out West home to his fiancee Bess and he would turn a phrase that struck me as particularly apt. This happened when he just wrote the letters and didn't overthink them. But overall, the kind of letters that only a mother could love and a doting son would want to save and see published.
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