• 1 of 1 person find this helpful

  • 

  • I picked this book up not knowing a single thing about it. One of the best decisions I have made. This was a page turner for sure. I have recommended to others who have all enjoyed and are reading his other books. I highly recommend this book.

    

    Is this helpful?

• ― Dave Sanders said on Feb 24, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

• .

  • The Devil in the White City

  • This book drew me in from the preface. I was already familiar with the facts behind the crimes of H.H. Holmes, but having been born and raised in St. Louis was much more familiar with the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair than this predecessor of 11 years. I found both the tale of the challenges of build ... Continue

    This book drew me in from the preface. I was already familiar with the facts behind the crimes of H.H. Holmes, but having been born and raised in St. Louis was much more familiar with the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair than this predecessor of 11 years. I found both the tale of the challenges of building and running the 1893 Worlds Fair and the tale of the depravities of H.H. Holmes equally riveting.

    

    Is this helpful?

• ― Readingrat said on Apr 4, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.

Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

To find out more about this book, go to http://www.DevilInTheWhiteCity.com.


From the Hardcover edition.

• hardbacknovelapril2008歐美推理小說My favorites19th century historyNon-fiction