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 listener 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 audiobook 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 audiobook, go to http://www.DevilInTheWhiteCity.com.
Don’t let it catfish you
"This book was chosen for our May book for #patiosandpagesyyc bookclub and I just could not bring myself to do it haha. This is my first DNF for this bookclub. I read 10 pages put it down and could not pick it back up. The consensus of the bookclub was it catfished us into thinking it was better book and it was over descriptive about things no one cared about like soil. We needed more on the murderer. I think they said those chapters were better but they were shot and not enough. Anyways I DNF’d because in 10 pages it was the most boring this I have ever read in my life. I’m also in a big ass slump and I will not put myself in more of a slump to read a book that no one else liked ahhaa and most likely I won’t like. And I actually even owned this book in the past and ending up unhauling it so it’s one I did want to read and thought sounded interesting. I do not recommend."
