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

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America | Erik Larson | The Devil in the White city

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The Devil in the W...

	The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America Erik Larson Vintage, 2004 - 447 pages average customer review:based on 777 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

The Devil in the White city

Totally loved this book! I love to read about things that really happened and with such accuracy and attention to details. He makes history interesting! Now I just can't wait to go back to Chicago to see all the sites mentioned in the book.

Read It!

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It's a good example of truth being better than fiction. The accomplishments, connections, events, and action are almost too much to believe. It's a page turner with an easy format and readable style. The author deserves much praise for research, organization, and presentation of an event and era that I feel most of us know nothing about. I especially found the brief descriptions of Hunt, Olmstead, and others helpful as "behind the scenes" shapers of America. As a summer read, I just happened to be visiting both the Vanderbilt mansion and Chicago while vacationing. To be in the museum district of Chicago and recall the White City was terrific. I am on my way to buy his other book.

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A good read

Enjoyable book about a criminal who until this book has generally just merited a "mention" in books about serial killers.
Very interesting back/side story about the men who planned, designed and built the Chicago's World's Fair.
My only criticism of this book would be the development of the tie-in between the fair builders and the criminal. It wasn't wasn't well developed - it was difficult to discern what the author's point was using this style of writing and joining the two stories.
Overall, however, I would highly recommend this book. Fortunately, both stories are interesting in and of their own.

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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

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