In an era when human incursion into the landscape invites trepidation, Karl Haglund's thorough and intriguing Inventing the Charles River arrives to remind us that heroic construction can, in fact, ameliorate it. Haglund's timely and engaging tale of the transformation of a river replete with 'squalid hovels' and 'inky black' sewage deposits shows how the past can be the portent of a better future.
Jane Holtz Kay, architecture and planning critic, and author of Lost Boston and Asphalt Nation
A remarkable and beautiful book outlining the origins of the famed and admired Charles River.
Dennis Lythgoe
Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah
a superb book.
The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine
...[a] fascinating fact-packed and photo-filled book.
Boston Metro
Haglund has fascinating stories to tell...serious students of urban development will be engrossed.
H. Nolan
ASLA
Inventing the Charles River is a fascinating account of how a great urban area acquired its current shape.
Philip Langdon
New Urban News
Inventing the Charles River makes it hard to think about the Charles in the same way again.
Max Page
Architecture Boston
...lavishly illustrated with maps, etchings, lithographs, drawings, paintings, and photographs...
APA
...[Tells] a sweeping, detailed story of the directed evolution that produced the Charles that Bostonians and tourists cherish today.
Civil Engineering
The book swells with Haglund's excellent research and hundreds of illuminating maps, photographs, and plans.
Michael B. Shavelson
Bostonia
Throughly fascinating...
Michael Kenney
Boston Globe
The wonderful Charles River is taken as a given, but, as this elegant, illuminating book shows, the Charles is a gift. Karl Haglund honors its 'inventors', our benefactors, by showing, also, that their work remains unfinished. Haglund has written an important, beautiful book.
James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist, and author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews
The Charles River truly was inventing. Befitting its Boston setting, and the great universities that line its banks, it is a confluence of nature, ideas, design, and engineering—not to mention ideals, politics, vision, and intrigue. Karl Haglund, through words and images, lovingly and intelligently tells the story of the ever-evolving, and ever-inspiring Charles.
Charles M. Vest, President, MIT
Honor Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, 2003
