Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #276 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-10
• Released on: 2004-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 447 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history 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, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, 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. 6 b&w photos, 1 map.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Larson's ambitious, engrossing tale of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 focuses primarily on two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect who was the driving force behind the fair, and Henry H. Holmes, a sadistic serial killer working under the cover of the busy fair. After the 1889 French Exposition Universel wowed the world with the Eiffel Tower and high attendance numbers, interest began to grow in the U.S. for a similar fair. Chicago and New York were the top contenders for the location, and in February 1890, Chicagoans were overjoyed to hear they had won the honor. Burnham and his partner, John Root, the leading architects in Chicago, were tapped for the job, and they in turn called on Frederick Law Olmstead, Louis Sullivan, and Richard M. Hunt to help them build the world's greatest fair. They faced overwhelming obstacles: inhospitable weather, bureaucracy, illness, and even death. Unbeknownst to any of them, Holmes, a charismatic, handsome doctor, had arrived in the city and built a complex with apartments, a drugstore, and a vault, which he used to trap his victims until they suffocated. When the White City opened for business in May 1893, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to it, although a plummeting economy and several accidents did nothing to help business. A shocking murder concludes the ultimately successful fair, and that's before Holmes claims his final victims in the cruelest act of his career. A magnificent book. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Serendipity Does Not Literature Make
I must admit. I don't get it. Two books with grotesque murders related in gory detail against backgrounds of world historical events the intersections of which have little to do with each other. There is a bit of a problem with partially fictionalized history. It becomes a little like infomercials. How much info and how much mercial? And does the fiction begin to stand for the real history rather than admitting when it comes to history there is a lot we don't know and may never know as much as we would like our understanding of the past to read like a novel? It does not and maybe never can. I know a superb writer/historian/anthropologist who has filled an excellent book with words his hero might have said, and the hero in his old age came to believe that the fictionalized account was indeed what he had done. That is a touching confirmation but nonetheless a distortion. Holmes, the villain of this book may have gotten sexual gratification while listening to his victims being gassed to death and I guess that titillates the reader, but the author has no real idea of Holmes' state of mind. Also the Chicago World's Fair had little to with Holmes' murders and the reverse. Then as an extra the author throws in the murderer of Chicago's mayor by an unbalanced newspaper distributor. Yes there were nuts, as there have always been--- John Hinckley, Jr. shot Reagan because of a crush on Jodie Foster---and girls have always disappeared. Both Chicago's painted ladies and the Fair's commotion were not unique. So it is all a literary artifice. I am not sure readers would have been interested in the social history of the Fair without the murders.

As to that social history, it is interesting. Larsen has done a formidable amount or research and presents it in an interesting manner. But Larsen often lapses into purple prose. The biggest, greatest, etc. It gets a bit tiresome and is not true of history. That Westinghouse beat Edison with alternating current I don't think can be attributed to the Fair. And so it goes. Were it not for books on tape, grinding California traffic, and too many hours in a car, I would not have made it through the book. Fast forwarding helps. I must admit that I skipped a lot of detail such as Olmstead's various ailments and even his theory of color but found myself going back to the murder. Yet I could have done without some of the gory stuff. I don't quite understand how Holmes got away with it. But then I guess Larsen does a good job of conveying his charm even if that might have been somewhat fictionalized. With the murderer, he is so unimportant to history that it doesn't really matter. Lots of people who read fiction will like this book a lot more than I did and maybe they will thereby learn some history. I am all for that.

Charlie Fisher, author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

magical
not many books transport you to a time of great changes like this one does. for the too brief of period I have lived in the book I have lived the rise of a nation and the dawn of great evil and vision. wonderfull depictions, great people and amzing time.

Exciting History
Loved it from start to finish! Wanted it to never end. As an enthusiest of non-fiction, I was pleased with all of the interesting tidbits of history as well as the main "plot". I never review anything but this is worth spreading the news about. Read it 1st, then get the audio CD for a trip. I could read it again and again.