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Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

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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) 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 on 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.
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524 printed pages
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Impressions

  • Rachel Marshallshared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    💤Borrrriiinnng!

    This is an odd read in that it does start off quite slowly as it flicks between the building of the Chicago World’s Fair and the crimes of HH Holmes but it does end up worth it once we get to the point the fair opens! I learned so much about the fair and it’s impact on history that I was easily able to forgive the boring early chapters of architectural discussion and politics.

  • Мариshared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile
    💞Loved Up
    🚀Unputdownable

    Fascinating story!

  • sksaddam298shared an impression8 years ago

    Sk saddam hossain

Quotes

  • Мариhas quoted6 years ago
    And just before the heat wave, a rising young British writer had published a scalding essay on Chicago. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”
  • omgkittehhas quoted10 years ago
    “There is,” he wrote, “a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing very long.”

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