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The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Paperback)
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
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The 1893 Chicago World's Fair is the setting for this true account of two very different men: Daniel H. Burnham and H.H. Holmes....more
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Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) murdered somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago. Many of the murders occurred during the city's finest moment and exploited the World's Fair of 1893. The book is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed. Portions copyright 2002 Publishers Weekly.
- Author: Larson, Erik
- ISBN: 9780375725609
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 464
- Publish Date: 2/1/2004
- Publisher: Vintage Books
- Language: English
Portions copyright 2005 Muze Inc. A
- Author:
- Larson, Erik
- ISBN:
- 9780375725609
- Format:
- Paperback
- Pages:
- 464
- Publish Date:
- 02/01/2004
- Publisher:
- Vintage Books
- Language:
- English
Portions copyright 2005 Muze Inc. All rights reserved.
- 5 Stars 3
- 4 Stars 1
- 3 Stars 0
- 2 Stars 0
- 1 Stars 0
Overall Rating: 4.8
Most Helpful Reviews
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If you like history; if you like mystery; if you like darned fine writing, buy this book. Especially if you live in Chicago. I give it a rave review.
Most Recent Reviews
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Educational and suspenseful
I should have read this years ago. One of the best books I have every read. This is especiallly interesting to anyone from in and around Chicago. So much information about arcitecture in Chicago, along with the suspense of a good and true murder mystery.
- How did the image on site compare with the actual product? excellent
- How accurate was the on site description of the product? very accurate
- Please tell us about the quality of the product. fine quality
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Can't ask for more
Fast delivery and a great price---doesn't get any better!
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Lots of White City, Little of the Devil
The Devil in the White City is a riveting chronicle of the personality confilcts, economic challenges and strokes of pure bad luck that plagued the architects who created the Chicago World's Fair. Tantilizing bits of information are dropped throughout about Dr. H.H. Holmes and the horrors he committed in his house, and we are treated to dribbles of information on the workings of his clearly damaged mind, but the teaser is never satisfied. 95% of the book focuses on the Fair and immensely satisfies the curiosity of those who really wonder how it all came together as a fleeting flash of historical greatness, but the 5% we get on Dr. Holmes and his unfortunate victims is almost an afterthought. It seems as though Larsen's original intent was to juxtapose the brightness of the fair and the brilliance of its architects against the darkness of a mad mind calculating the slow torture and death of his victims, but overall the battle of light and dark seems to be waged between the public perception of the Fair's creation as something that magically happened and the reality of the down-and-dirty struggle to realize a dream against enormous odds. Another 50 or so pages of investigation and detail, rather than scores upon scores of endnotes that refer to documents unavailable to the general public, would have been more satisfying. Nevertheless, the sparcity of detail on Holmes' crimes is sufficient to ignite the reader's further interest. Criminologists will no doubt find it disappointing, but overall, the book is a grand read for anyone interested in urban history, architecture or sociology.
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