From the New York Times Sunday Book Review,
Lightning Rods and Sideshows
by CAROLINE WEBER, May 29, 2009
"... In James H. S. McGregor’s “Paris From the Ground Up” — which offers an informative history of the city’s art and architecture — the Eiffel Tower necessarily plays a smaller role, occupying only four pages of a book that, by contrast, devotes a 30-page chapter to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But those four pages are invaluable, as they explain with admirable economy a crucial fact that Jonnes, oddly, never mentions: Eiffel’s engineering genius consisted in combining linear and curvilinear support systems — rectilinear cross-braced pylons and arches. This insight is typical of McGregor, who has written three other books in the From the Ground Up series and who is at his best when elaborating on the technical aspects of Paris’s buildings. ...quot...
