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In The Devil in the White City, the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age stand out as never before.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an factor 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 several of the country’s most important structures, like the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a 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, among 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 with their deaths. What makes the story even more chilling is the fact Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of this dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made even more appealing with a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, among others. 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.
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