 
|
|
Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN13: 9780375725609
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America’s place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing. --John Moe
| Customer Reviews: |
|
| |
| Glorious and grizzly, Chicago's past comes alive |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
 |
|
When I returned to Chicago after having been gone for decades, I looked at this remarkable city, its splendid lakefront and its vibrant architecture with new eyes. Who were the people and what were the events that founded this bigness of spirit?
When a friend recommended "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America" by Erik Larson, and I devoured it immediately. And I recommend this book to anyone who has become enthralled with Chicago's buildings, its culture and its optimism.
From the outset this book reads like the work of an expert journalist who did his research about Chicago around the time of the 1893 World's Fair. There is nothing like a rich treasure trove of historical photographs, maps, letters, architectural blueprints and court records from murder cases to fire one's imagination. I only wish that more of these documents were available to look at in the book. (I read the paperback.)
Two characters are drawn in detail -- Daniel Burnham, the ambitious architect and city visionary, and Henry Holmes, the maniacal and singularly effective psychopathic killer who managed to spirit trusting young women to their deaths right under the Fair's nose. The grandiose plans of both these men frame the portrait of this city on the brink of the 20th century. Sometimes the back-and-forth between their stories is awkward; but on the whole it's quick and gripping read.
The grotesque Holmes murder rampage is crime fiction based on fact, and really, you couldn't make up stuff more mesmerizing than this. It was all over the front pages of the Chicago Tribune for most of July, 1895, when the hotel that Holmes had maintained near the fair was searched for its grizzly secrets. But what the newspaper accounts don't do, and what Larson attempted a la Truman Capote, was to get inside the mind of a murderer so smooth that he was able to manipulate multiple victims like puppets dancing to their doom.
You'll find that what you repeat to your friends, though, are the dozens of fascinating details of the Fair itself, from the introduction of the zipper to the enormous Ferris Wheel. A magnificent machine that carried 60 passengers in each car and threatened disaster as it rained bolts with every revolution, it was accepted late from unproven designs on paper because leaders had come up empty-handed in their efforts to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower. They took a splendid gamble with that wheel, which went on to become the hit of the exhibition. Can you imagine getting that one past the lawyers now?
|
| A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
 |
|
Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY (2003) is an unclassifiable book. It seems to tolerate no generic distinction. Yes, it is a work of history---there are copious endnotes and a substantive bibliography; its research seems historiographically sound; every direct quotation is taken from an imposing armature of reputable sources. And yet it reads as if it were a novel.
The book is concerned with two figures who are said to be diametrically opposed to each other: Daniel Burnham, one of the chief architects of Chicago's world fair, and H.H. Holmes, murderer of young women. Both are said to be emblematical of the Gilded Age, that is, late nineetenth-century industrial America. And both are said to have converged at the World's Columbian Exposition.
The book's premise seems to be that, in America's Gilded Age, two polar energies were at work: that of technological construction and that of destabilization, the grandeur of architecture and what erodes stability and the ascent of progress. Larson further qualifies this opposition in his introductory "Note": "[I]t is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black."
But are architecture and destructuring, "good" and "evil" parallel oppositions? Where can "good" and "evil" be seen in the Gilded Age outside of these two isolated figures? Are architecture and destructuring indeed opposed to each other? Where else was this vague destructuring at work in the Gilded Age? Outside of a description of what Holmes and Burnham did and said, Larson does not provide answers to these questions.
The "voice" of the work is that of the grandfatherly storyteller. Nearly every sentence is bloated with hoary bombast. Patiently, bombastically, the author recounts the stories of the murderer and the architect. And yet what is the meaning of it all?
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY never affords its readers access to the killer's mind. In the section of book entitled "Notes and Sources," Larson concedes, "Exactly what motivated Holmes may never be known." He defers to "what forensic psychiatrists have come to understand about psychopathic serial killers." But should forensic psychiatry be given the last word? Is the dossier then closed after they have spoken?
What, exactly, is the relationship, for Larson, between the architect and the murderer? Is Larson suggesting that Holmes's desire for "dominance and possession" was also the desire of Burnham? Does Burnham merely wear a more socially acceptable mask? Do they represent two variations of the same impulse?
Dr. Joseph Suglia
|
| More about the Expo, not much about the murders |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
 |
|
I won't rehash what others have said, but I'll just say the book should have been billed as being about what it took to get the Chicago World's Fair up and going with just a small side story about a murderer because there sure wasn't much about that. If you are interested in the minutae of the Fair and what it took for the architects and engineers to get the Fair running, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for something about a murderer, you will probably be disappointed looking for it here because not much of the story is dedicated to that.
|
| super boring! |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
|
|
took all i had not to quit reading this slow book. doen't get good until the last fifty pages.
|
| The Beautiful and the Monstrous |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
|
|
Erik Larsen (Isaak's Storm) has combined two very different stories in his book. The stories both take place in Chicago, the Second City. One is the story of David Burnham and his ability to create the White City that was the key to the Worlds Fair in Chicago. He managed this success in a mere two years, dealing with problems ranging from arhcitectural challenges, weather extremes, personnel disputes and financial threats. He endured a series of personal challenges, ranging from moderate to severely challenging
The shadow story centers on H H Holmes, evil personified. H H Holmes was a very charismatic and manipulative man who murdered anywhere from 7 to 200 people, most of them young women. He used people as tools for two purposes, one was to amass financial means and the other was to indulge his passion for murder. Holmes, after figuring out how to obtain a drugstore throug hdeception and murder, buys a lot across the street and builds the "Castle" a boarding house targeted towards mainly young women coming to Chicago for the Worlds Fair. Holmes sees the potential both financially and as a source of potential victims, He builds a horror chamber of crematoriums, secret windowless rooms fitted with gas lines for asphixiation , doors that can only be opened by him, angled halls and stairways to nowhere. When a wife, lover , employee or aquaintance outlived their usefulness they silently disappear, murdered and disposed of.
The stories run side by side but do not actually intertwine. Burnhams story is about his passion for something positive to be pursued at all costs, each stumbling block placed in his path is turned aside for good. Holmes passion is inthe opposite direction, death and destruction for his own dark purpose, yet he pursues his passion with as much vigor and intensity.
The story of Holmes felt to me to be a penultimate evil and yet the reading seemed to lack the depth and graphic feel. Erik Larsen wrote that he turned to the Capote's book In Cold Blood to grasp the telling of evil. It seems, even with the given detail that a man this evil would have a grittier, darker telling that Larsen just did not achieve.
All that said this was an amazing tale of both the beautiful and the monstrous, creation and destruction. Erik Larsen shows two sides of an amazing period of time in Chicago's history.
|
|
