The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town , by Andrew Ross. Ballantine Books, 352 pages, $26.

Granted: Living in New York breeds a peculiar kind of intolerance. To my mind, the prospect of being greeted with a chorus of "Hip, hip, hooray!" by your block-partying neighbors-to-be minutes after closing on an overpriced, ticky-tacky cottage home should be enough to send any sentient adult running back to the real estate office tovoidthecontract.Unfortunatelyfor Doug- las Frantz and Catherine Collins, the husband-and-wife journalist team whose year in residence in the prefab Florida town of Celebration began precisely this way in 1997, they had already signed another contract: the one that obligated them to go through with writing Celebration, U.S.A. Their confused book inadvertently highlights all the worst things about living in small-town America (the petty gossip, power struggles, stifling conformity and forced cheerfulness) and at the same time enthusiastically endorses the neotraditionalist design philosophy of community and social engagement that the Walt Disney Company built Celebration to embody.

The creepiest thing about the town built by the megacorporation behind one in every four movie tickets purchased is not the intrusion of corporate culture into the public sphere but the evidence it provides of the company's already pervasive influence: the almost religious faith of the "dyed-in-the-wool Disney freaks" who make up the majority of Celebration's first wave of pioneers. These folks, who vacation almost exclusively at Disney theme parks and resorts and routinely toss around the phrase "pixie dust" (when they're mad, they say: "I've got pixie dust coming out of my ass"), moved to Florida expecting Disney to provide the backdrop for their fairy tale future. One resident psychologist got it right: "Those people don't need Celebration. They need counseling." It seems they often feel compelled to mask their search for a quality-controlled Main Street utopia with exaggerated tales of personal sacrifice.

Celebration has been hyped as a new chapter in both urban planning and American values. It's supposed to offer a new solution to the social isolation and architectural sterility of suburban sprawl. Yale architecture dean Robert Stern's master plan will go a long way toward keeping Celebration on the architectural map. But behind the desire to build "a living laboratory for the American Town … a model for new town development everywhere," we find a very old-fashioned motive: This was a profitable way for the company to develop miles of pristine swampland bought by Walt Disney in the 1960's, land it risked losing if left untouched. Walt had in mind a 20,000-person domed city of skyscrapers called Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)–instead, we got an international fast-food court and futuristic theme park (now somewhat dated) that bear that name.

No doubt the plan for the new town would have pleased Disney, who famously said he'd "rather be the benevolent dictator of Disney enterprises" than President of the United States. True to the founder's spirit, the company makes its paternalistic presence felt: A hired consultant acts as de facto mayor and enforces rules prohibiting everything from colored curtains and clotheslines to complaining about mosquitoes and harassing alligators. Far from resenting corporate control, Celebrationites clamor for more; they mourn the fact that Disney has stripped its name from the town (it was originally called Disney's Town of Celebration). Residents fear that the company is reneging on its commitment to assure their quality of life.

Consider the progressive K-12 school that was the town's main selling point for many residents. At Celebration School, teachers are called "learning leaders," classrooms are called "neighborhoods," report cards have marks in categories like "respects human diversity as part of our multicultural society and world," and a lesson on potential and kinetic energy takes place aboard Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. Some parents have had trouble adjusting to the alternative curriculum and jargon. Others are disappointed by the disparity between the sales pitch and their children's experience. The disgruntled have rechristened a promotional video about a day in the life of a Celebration student: "Eddie Does Disney," they call it.

Like good reporters, Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins try to remain objective–but they succeed only in apologizing alternately for the antics of the town's residents and for the looming corporate presence. Our co-authors are impressed by the can-do spirit that united the community "in an endeavor that ran counter to the overall decline of civil society in America"; they repeatedly defend Disney's involvement and praise the company's high-mindedness: "Disney could have taken the safe route and developed another golf-course.… Instead, the company did some-thing truly innovative." Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins insist they were tempted to stay for at least another year, but in the end they decided to head back north in search of bookstores, conversation and diversity.

Andrew Ross, director of the American studies program at New York University, tells a similar story in The Celebration Chronicles , this time from the point of view of a 40ish urban bachelor working hard to stay hip. To spend a year in an apartment in Celebration, he dragged himself from "the dense turbulence, multicultural throngs, and ultra-liberal life-styles of downtown Manhattan" with a weak imperative: "If we are ever to be good neighbors in the larger landscape, there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg's famous cartoon map of the 'New Yorker's View of the World.'" His book, more informal than Celebration, U.S.A., gives voice to gays, teenagers and others who are left out of the family-oriented portrait produced by Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins.

And Mr. Ross actually makes an argument. The motivating principle behind the residents' frenetic community-building efforts, he writes, is the desire to protect the value of a real estate investment. He concludes that the controversy over Celebration School all boils down to the parents' worry that their children's academic performance will ultimately affect the property value of their homes. Mr. Ross doesn't take sides; he prefers to smoke and commiserate with the disaffected teenagers caught in the middle.

The Celebration Chronicles seeks to determine the "direction of public life at the end of the century" and where the Disney town figures in. Mr. Ross worries about the philosophical underpinning of the New Urbanist movement, which strongly influenced Celebration. (Its mantra is "to improve the world with design, plain good old design.") He bristles at the idea of urban planning as social engineering–perhaps because it reminds him of New York's own "benevolent dictator" who squints at democracy and prefers a top-down approach to the public good.

Jewish enrollment at Princeton University–site of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise –has dropped by 40 percent in the last 15 years. According to The Daily Princetonian , the campus newspaper, Jewish students now make up about 10 percent of the freshmen class. That is the same as the number that Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell tried to impose–he wanted to establish a 10 percent quota of Jews at Harvard–in 1922. In 1985, that number was 16 percent, according to The Princetonian .

A Princeton spokesman faxed The Observer results from an independent study conducted by the American Council on Education and the University of California at Los Angeles. It confirmed The Princetonian 's numbers, but also presented them next to the national average for private universities, for which the decline in Jewish enrollment mirrored that of Princeton.

At the end of April, The Princetonian ran a four-part series addressing the decline, describing it as "Princeton's best-kept open secret." The reports depicted a campus grasping for theories as to why Princeton, long dogged by a reputation for anti-Semitism, has such a low number of Jewish students, while the enrollment of Jews at its Ivy League rivals, Harvard and Yale, remains high: 21 percent at Harvard, 29 percent at Yale, according to Hillel, the foundation for Jewish campus life.

In the interim, professors, students and administrators have stepped up with explanations: The admissions department has emphasized geographical diversity, moving away from a heavy reliance on the Northeast region; there are too many slots reserved for athletes; Jews have been displaced by Asian-Americans; the percentage of college applicants who are Jewish is down nationwide (from 4 percent in 1978 to 1.6 percent now, according to one study cited in The Princetonian ).

And there are others: The admissions department emphasizes suburban high schools over urban high schools; the conservative and elitist social atmosphere, or at least the reputation of one, scares Jewish students–and their guidance counselors–away. The antiquated eating club culture centered around Prospect Street, with its "bicker" rituals and selective memberships, continues to set the social tone at Princeton, which has long combined the social mores of a small Southern college with Northeastern intellectual ones–the home of both Cottage Club and Albert Einstein.

There has even been the theory forwarded that the subsiding of Jewish enrollment has come from the fact that it's hard for Jews to get a date at the university; they end up going to Philadelphia to find their mates at the University of Pennsylvania, where Jews make up 28 percent of the student body: The Princetonian said that many students have been heard to say of the school, "It's great academically and it's a lot of fun here, and we're so close to Penn!"

Whatever its cause, the declining Jewish enrollment is an especially sensitive topic for Princeton, not only because it's, well, Princeton , but because it once had a pretty serious reputation for being less tolerant of Jews than some of its Ivy League brethren. Obsolete as this reputation may be now, even the appearance of intolerance taints the school, and makes its already difficult task of attracting Jews even more difficult.

And the series in The Princetonian has turned into a public relations headache for Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon, who has come under fire from several faculty members for being inattentive to their concerns.

Speaking for Mr. Hargadon, Justin Harmon, Princeton's director of communications, said: "There appears to be such strong feeling on the part of some members of the faculty that they decided that this matter ought to be raised in a fairly vituperative manner in the student newspaper. And I guess some of us are concerned about the consequences of that choice for the very students for whom they're expressing concern.

"In other words, how does it make a prospective student feel if she reads the newspaper and she's Jewish and she's trying to consider where to send her application and she sees a story, however benign it may be, about declining enrollments at Princeton? How does she decide to apply to Princeton as opposed to Harvard? Or if you put a less benign interpretation on it: The work of the institution over the last however many years to create a welcoming environment for Jewish students is effectively undone."

Last year, the administration convened a study group of faculty members to review the admissions process, in response to their concern that "Jewish enrollment was dropping, intellectual quality was dropping, and that there were too many jocks," Mr. Harmon said. Their main recommendation was to increase the class size by as much as 25 percent, and the board of trustees is expected to consider it.

"Why some of these same faculty then turn around and decide that they need to pursue this particular diatribe I don't know. But unfortunately a lot of it has the flavor of a personal invective against the current Dean of Admissions," said Mr. Harmon. "They're hurting their cause. If their cause is truly looking for greater control over the admissions process, they're being utterly disingenuous. It's not clear to me why individuals who held as their highest goal increasing Jewish enrollment would give interviews to the newspaper accusing the administration of inattention to concern about Jewish enrollment. Either you'd be an idiot if you failed to understand the consequences of a story of that nature appearing or you're being disingenuous. And these aren't idiots."

No. they're not. They must be aware that any controversy over Princeton's Jewish enrollment is bound to sting. It's never been the same kind of magnet for Jewish urbanites that Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Penn have. The school has a slightly Southern air, and it has long been considered more socially conservative than its fellow Ivy League colleges. The stain of the old quota system, under which the universities in the Ivy League tacitly agreed to keep their Jewish enrollment below a certain percentage (they justified it by saying they were limiting the numbers to prevent anti-Semitism), hung around a little longer at Princeton than at Harvard and Yale.

But it's long gone. The school has done much to improve Jewish life on campus. In 1993, it built a Center for Jewish Life, and it has been aggressive in building a program in Jewish studies and attracting star faculty.

"For me the tragedy would be if, because 50 years ago this was an anti-Semitic place, people assume it still is," Mr. Harmon said. "That's very much not the case."

Froma Zeitlin, director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Princeton, told The Observer that she and her colleagues have raised the issue with the administration, but she said, "This is not a place where you make waves."

Plagued by political infighting and haphazard design, the chronically delayed Hudson River Park is a reminder that a great park requires more than a strip of open land. Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century landscape architect who designed Central Park, had what today's park planners lack: both the rare ability to imagine what New Yorkers need and the political muscle to make it work. With A Clearing in the Distance , Witold Rybczynski, the author of lively and accessible architectural history and criticism, provides context for the famous landscapes Olmsted "painted" with natural materials across the country.

When Olmsted won the design competition for Central Park in 1858, the 36-year-old had only limited experience in planning and politics and still occasionally relied on his father's generosity to keep himself afloat. His appointment the year before as superintendent of the park was orchestrated by prominent New Yorkers familiar with his writings on Southern agriculture and London's parks. Although he wouldn't fully embrace landscape architecture as his vocation until nearly 10 years later, Olmsted was already something of a visionary: "The time will come when New York will be built up … and when the picturesquely varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect, angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single exception of the Park." With the critical help of gifted architect Calvert Vaux, Olmsted engineered a marvel of urban design, which, almost 150 years later, is still one of the principal reasons New York City is still habitable with a population of more than 7 million.

This astonishing success was not a bolt from the blue. Olmsted's useful stints as scientific farmer, surveyor, sailor, journalist and businessman involved one or both of his lifelong passions: the study of natural and manmade scenery, and civic improvement. Before finding his true calling, he argued the case against slavery on economic grounds in a series of articles for The New York Times . During the Civil War, he helped establish and run the U.S. Sanitary Commission, precursor to the Red Cross. He pioneered the national park system. He also helped found The Nation . After building Central Park, he designed dozens of landscapes including Prospect Park and Riverside Park, the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C. He also raised four children, including two sons of his brother John Hull, who had died of tuberculosis and whose widow, Mary, Olmsted married.

Throughout his life, recurring illness caused by stress and overwork sent Olmsted abroad in search of salubrious climes, and thus he discovered the healing power of picturesque scenery. After touring in London public parks as beautiful as private estates, he decided that New York needed a "People's Park" to provide "a sense of enlarged freedom" for regular people: "the feeling of relief experienced by those entering [a park], on escaping from the cramped, confined and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town … is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park." Olmsted, who grew up wealthy in verdant Connecticut, recognized the universal value of scenery as a powerful civilizing force and agent of social reform. He wrote of his own Central Park: "It is one great purpose of the park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances." Olmsted built Central Park for those of us still saving up for our Hamptons compound.

He didn't always have an easy time selling his bold ideas to the parks commissioners and private clients because his high standards of design and execution often required a significant cash investment and a slow payoff. In the case of Central Park, these priorities were in direct conflict with the quick, cheap fixes favored by the corrupt Tammany Hall Democrats running the city at the time. But he was a good salesman and skillfully manipulated the press. On several occasions, he enlisted prominent literary friends and newspaper editors such as Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant and George Templeton Strong to launch editorial campaigns to support his bid for a new job or to defend him against a political attack. Unlike Robert Moses, New York's other uncompromising park builder, however, Olmsted managed to make an omelet without breaking too many eggs; his demanding nature inspired respect and loyalty, not hatred and fear. Even when waging his fiercest political battles, Mr. Rybczynski's Olmsted is shockingly scrupulous and honorable.

The author is most critical of Olmsted's indecision (referenced under "indolence" in the index) regarding his career. "Why can't he just get on with it?" Mr. Rybczynski demands before his tone softens and gives way to personal reverie: "When I was his age … I sketched, wrote poems, fell in and out of love, and taught myself sculpture." Mr. Rybczynski goes even further with this modish first-person approach to biography; in several imaginary narrative passages scattered throughout A Clearing in the Distance , he tries to "see the world in [Olmsted's] eyes," as he explains in an author's note. Hence this glimpse of our hero's reaction to a successful business meeting: "Olmsted's indigestion is bothering him–he shouldn't have eaten so much." Or again, when Olmsted hears from an old friend "It had made him cry, that letter." These forays into Olmsted's psyche notwithstanding, the author conveys little about the intellectual or emotional life of this complicated man. Mr. Rybczynski must have felt something extra was needed–why else insert imaginary episodes from Olmsted's inner life? The author would have done better to stick to the facts. These passages seem to me more indulgent than evocative; they also suggest that Mr. Rybczynski might be better off nixing that novel he's clearly itching to write.

A Clearing in the Distance offers some insight into several spheres of 19th-century American life, but it doesn't quite encompass America in the 19th century as the subtitle promises. It introduces some of the major literary and political players of the period, and reminds us that New York was (and is) run by a surprisingly close-knit intellectual and power elite. But it only briefly examines the social and political undercurrents of the Civil War and its aftermath, and it only touches lightly on the pervasive corruption and political battles in city government during the Tammany Hall era.

Mr. Rybczynski is steadier on his feet when he evaluates Olmsted's designs and their application, and when he describes his personal experience of the landscapes. Even in his own day, Olmsted's humane ambitions and accomplishments earned him a reputation as the national authority on parks and urban design. A Clearing in the Distance reminds us of those accomplishments and adds to our appreciation of his priceless contribution to the American landscape.