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It teaches lessons about about building things and human nature. It cascaded to me after she read it. My wife's book club thought this was a winner. After reading the book you will want to talk about it with friends or your spouse. It is a gripping story for both men and women. Not a light read. Any city who builds for an event, World's Fair or the Olympics, can be put in perspective by this book. Times may have changed but human strengths and weaknesses are timeless.
Recommendation: This book encompasses so many interesting facts and subjects, it's got something for everyone. Burnham (and many others, including Olmsted, who designed Central Park) set out to achieve the impossible against all odds, creating a "white city" set against the backdrop of a dark and rough metropolis.
It's a page turner. I would be reading on a week night and look up to find it was 4 am.
Set in the chaos of late nineteenth century Chicago, Devil in the White City is one of the most meticulously researched and engrossing books I've read in years. Chicago at the time was full of dualities, simultaneously a place of wild possibility and total despair.
The book hones in on two fascinating events of the late 1800s: architect Daniel Burnham and the construction of the World's Fair, and the notorious serial killer H.H. Holmes.
Concurrently, Holmes preys on naive young women coming to the city seeking adventure and opportunity, constructing a "murder castle" in which he would slowly lure in his victims and murder them. Highly recommended.
However, I found myself totally captivated instead by all the details of getting the World's Fair of 1893 underway in Chicago. One pivotal person was knocked out just by needing an appendectomy. The difficulties were enormous. That alone made everything look spectacular. Bill Cody had his Wild West show next door to the fair and it was wildly successful. The planning for the fair was incredible. I expected to like the serial killer aspect of this work the best. Although the city was covered in grime from coal and gas lamps, electricity was brought to the world's fair.
However, we would find the privations of living back then unendurable for more than that. It killed him. There is a serial killer with his own hotel adjacent to the World's Fair. On one hand, there were constant worries about protecting against typhus and cholera outbreaks. The Ferris Wheel was invented for this fair as American engineers vied to come up with something at least as good as the Eiffel Tower, made for the Paris Expo (by Ferris of Pittsburg). I would love to get into a time capsule, see the fair for a day or two, get right back in and come back to modern life.
Health problems affected the project on every level. On another level, the men in their 50s and 60s in charge of the fair had medical problems which couldn't be fixed so they just suffered or, even worse, one of them would just die upon getting anything the least serious. This is because the fair is super intriguing and it would be quite an experience. He's pretty interesting but not really necessary to the outstanding detail of the World's Fair.
It brought back my high school days when I read true crime almost exclusively. This book alternated between the construction of the Chicago World's Fair and the story of H.H. Holmes a serial killer operating in Chicago at the same time.I was a lot more interested in the serial killer story line than the World's Fair construction story line. Because the serial killer part was less than half of the book, I didn't feel like it was developed as it could have been.Architecture buffs will like the construction story line more than I did I'm sure. I had trouble keeping all of the different men who were involved straight and some of the more technical references went over my head.
I did not receive the book I ordered. When I contacted Thrifit they responded very quickly and refunded my money immediately. Based on their customer service, I would give them another try.
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