If you have never read Larson, you are in for a treat. Meticulously researched, his nonfiction reads like a novel; the historical figures portrayed seem to walk off the page. The Devil in the White City tells the story of two very different men, an architect and a murderer. It is centered around Daniel Hudson Burnham and Dr. H.H. Holmes and their lives in Chicago in the first half of the 1890's.
Mr. Burnham was an architect and was responsible for the building of the World's Fair : Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair. The fair was timed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America and it's organizers' main goal was to surpass an exposition that had taken place in Paris in 1889 that had drawn 32 million visitors. The Paris exposition had had as its main attraction the newly unveiled Eiffel Tower. The Chicago architects wanted something equally spectacular to draw visitors to their exposition. After many failed proposals, a design by George Ferris was accepted, and construction on the Ferris Wheel began. Larson's portrayal of Burnham is of a man fighting against the political machines and red tape of his time to accomplish a spectacular fair in very limited time. The choice of a location, the design of the buildings, the budget, and creative details all ultimately fell on his shoulders. The fair would either be his greatest success or his greatest failure. The details that Larson is able to describe of the process of building the fair, along with his portrayal of Burnham as a man, makes for a very interesting read.
Combined with Daniel Burnham's story is the story of Dr. H.H. Holmes. A very different man, Dr. Holmes is believed to be responsible for the murders of between 27 and 200 people during the time of the World's Fair. Dr. Holmes built a hotel not far from the fair grounds, in order to attract fair goers. His hotel included the normal amenities, along with a few more sinister ones. His hotel included a vault which could be sealed to become both sound and air proof. In the vault was a gas valve that he could control from his office. Also in the hotel was a basement, that included a "kiln", built primarily so that Dr. Holmes could dispose of his victims via cremation. In a gruesome twist, Dr. Holmes also sold the bodies of some of his victims, for the purpose of making medical skeletons out of them. The skeletons were then sold to medical schools. Eventually caught and convicted, Dr. Holmes was hanged on May 7, 1896.
I found Erik Larson's writing style easy to read and very interesting. I have now started reading another of his books, Isaac's Storm, the story of Isaac Cline, Galveston's resident U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist during the hurricane of 1900. The Galveston Hurricane was not predicted by any meteorologist. I haven't gotten very far into this book, but so far it is as interesting as The Devil in the White City. Isaac comes to life in it's pages.
As this post has run on long enough, I'll have to tell you about some of the lighter fiction I've also been reading in a later post.
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