When Lewis Mumford chose the period from 1865 to 1895, "The Brown Decades," as he calls them, as the subject of his most recent critical study, he did America a great service. Those years are, to most of us, the age of brownstone mansions and little else; the author of "Sticks and Stones" and "The Golden Day" in his new book shows us that things of real importance were happening underneath the drab exterior of the period.

To call the era America's "Buried Renaissance" is extreme; those thirty years contributed much to the future development of our civilization, but they gave us few monuments. Richardson and Roebling, Marsh, Olmstead and Eliot--these men laid the foundations on which we have built, they did not contribute, in most cases, the masterpieces associated with a genuine renaissance. What Mr. Mumford said in "The Golden Day" is more nearly true than any expression he uses in "The Brown Decades," that "a genuine culture was beginning to struggle upward again in the seventies." That culture had not then and indeed has not now, reached its peak.

In architecture H. H. Richardson, the designer of Sever and Austin Halls in Cambridge, and of Trinity Church in Boston, "created almost single-handed out of a confusion which was actually worse than a mere void the beginnings of a new architecture. . . . In the fenestration of Austin Hall at Harvard (1881), he established the standards of a functionalist architecture." John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, destined to play an important part in the further development of functionalism, were influenced by Richardson in his maturity. Their contributions to architecture are also outlined by the author.

In a chapter entitled "The Renewel of the Landscape," he discusses the work of the landscape architects who planned and laid out Central Park in New York, a project which led to the establishment of numerous others all over the country. More interesting than this, though, is the story of the Roeblings, father and son, and their long struggle to erect the Brooklyn Bridge, the one great monument of the Brown Decades.

In painting, the period gave us the work of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder--but with Mr. Mumford at this point we are forced to part company. Winslow Homer we are willing to praise, but the other two are unworthy of the high position the author accords them. Perhaps the fault lies in the perspective of each individual reader--Mr. Mumford has evidently forgotten his European background.

Mr. Mumford has taken unpromising material and used it well, creating out of the Brown Decades a period both instructive and entertaining to modern readers. If it is less interesting than his earlier works, the fault is in the period, not in the interpreter; prospective readers need to be warned, however, to expect an unusually straightforward bit of writing, and incidentally of economic criticism on page 169.