4 out of 5 Stars!
Slowly but surely working my way toward a goal of 10 non-fiction books by the end of the year. This one was recommended by a friend and I couldn’t pass it up. Chicago, the World’s Fair, and a serial killer on the loose? Honestly, who could pass that up?!
Some BackgroundErik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.
Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
My Take?I’ve always struggled with reading non-fiction books, but honestly I loved this one!
Larson is a talented storyteller, weaving together the stories of multiple players who lived in Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair. Readers follow Daniel Burnham, the talented architectural mastermind behind the design and creation of the fair. Planning the fair against the clock, Burnham and his team fight hellacious weather, money issues, and red tape to transform the dream of the White City into a reality.
But in the shadows of this frantic planning and building, another fellow is hard at work. H.H. Holmes, now remembered as a notorious serial killer, had more humble beginnings. A talented grifter, readers discover how Holmes charmed people out of money, property, and even their lives.
Being non-fiction, there were definitely some dry points to the narrative, filled with names and dates that flew right out of my head. But the majority of the novel was intriguing and quite haunting. The descriptions of the Chicago World’s Fair, the White City, are vivid and beautiful. The clean lines of shining white buildings set against the backdrop of green lawns and tranquil waterways– I wish there would have been photographs! Alternately, the descriptions of Holmes’s hotel of horrors were terrifying. Larson even re-imagined the scenes of several of the murders for the book, piecing together words from Holmes’s own biography along with information from police files and court transcripts.
The amount of research that went into this book is just phenomenal. There were so many interesting facts, fun bits and pieces, that I couldn’t help but keep turning the pages. Did you know that the first Ferris wheel was built for Chicago’s fair? Or that Cracker Jacks and Wheaties were first introduced for the event?
Overall I give Larson’s book 4 out of 5 stars. Next time I’m in Chicago, I might look at things just a little bit differently..
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