Kayote B. (kayote) reviewed on 9/21/2017 + 254 more book reviews

It wasn't really a history and it was very loosely tied to the house he was supposedly using to trace history. It was also very dense. The first third was mostly about Victorian England the next chunk about the Gilded Age in the US and then bounced around for the rest. It didn't so much trace the history of anything as jump to a single slice in time and use it to (sometimes with the barest of connections) jump off into some historical side that didn't always relate to the room or anything in it well. I had expected more of the history of things in the room or the room itself, not a single-snapshot of something about the room and then an unrelated history lesson. Very dense, very weighty, but not really what it describes itself as and lacking cohesion. I don't regret reading it, but I can't really recommend it either--and certainly not to anyone who wants what is described on the back!

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