The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America,Books,Free Shipping,0375725601,

	The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
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Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 364.15230977311 EAN 9780375725609 ISBN 0375725601 Manufacturer Vintage Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 447 Publication Date February 10, 2004 Publisher Vintage Release Date February 10, 2004 Availability Usually ships in 24 hours 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. 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 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. 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 ?Engrossing . . . exceedingly well documented . . . utterly fascinating.? ?Chicago Tribune ?A dynamic, enveloping book. . . . Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramtic effect of a novel. . . . It doesn?t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.? --The New York Times 'So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already.' ?Esquire ?Another successful exploration of American history. . . . Larson skillfully balances the grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World?s Fair.??USA Today ?As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.??San Francisco Chronicle ?Paints a dazzling picture of the Gilded Age and prefigure the American century to come.??Entertainment Weekly ?A wonderfully unexpected book. . . Larson is a historian . . . with a novelist?s soul.??Chicago Sun-Times -- Review “Engrossing . . . exceedingly well documented . . . utterly fascinating.” —Chicago Tribune “A dynamic, enveloping book. . . . Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramtic effect of a novel. . . . It doesn’t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.” --The New York Times 'So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already.' —Esquire “Another successful exploration of American history. . . . Larson skillfully balances the grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World’s Fair.”—USA Today “As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Paints a dazzling picture of the Gilded Age and prefigure the American century to come.”—Entertainment Weekly “A wonderfully unexpected book. . . Larson is a historian . . . with a novelist’s soul.”—Chicago Sun-Times 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. 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. Erik Larson, author of the international bestseller Isaac’s Storm, has written for Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Time, where he is a contributing writer. He is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Seattle with his wife, three daughters, and assorted pets, including a golden retriever named Molly. The Black City How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, 'Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.' The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of 'our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.' The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. 'The parlors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now) rather dull places,' wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent trait of old Chicago. 'It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone.' In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to 'a human being with his skin removed.' Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city's rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was 'roasted.' There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed each other rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred homicides. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot each other by accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the Ripper's five-murder spree in 1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America, who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns. But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents. And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his liking. The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and untold others, addressed to that strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and daughters' children. It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history. From the Hardcover edition. Customers who bought this item also bought Thunderstruck Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record (Dover Architectural Series) Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul Loving Frank: A Novel Customer Reviews for: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America Rating - Many interesting bits, but bogs down at times For a native Chicagoan, I found the descriptions of the city in the late 1800's fascinating. The grit and crime juxtaposed with wealth and luxury was especially compelling. The narrative style was very enjoyable, but I was rather disappointed that the murder-mystery element (the "Devil" from the title) went relatively undeveloped until the closing chapters. As a result, the story seemed to drag at times, spending a bit too much time on less interesting ... Read More Rating - this book was a bestseller for good reason This is an excellent book which stands out amongst true crime books as one of the best. The author handles a gruesome topic without making the reader feel depressed. Every aspect of the crime is examined while the writer illuminates an historical perspective which is fascinating. Rating - Devil in the White City Great historical prosective of a wonderful city everyone claims to know..but doesn't know that much history about! Rating - The Chicago World's Fair Era This book is about two subjects: the 1892 Chicago World's Fair, and the murderer who killed scores of young women while operating a rooming house. [What a combination!] There is no Index, the Bibliography lists many old books that few can easily reference. I wonder how many readers know anything about the 1890s? They were not "The Good Old Days"; they had the worst depression of the 19th century. The first error is "a young woman named Borden killed her ... Read More see more reviews See all books by author Erik Larson

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