The Devil in the White City: Summary and book reviews of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, plus links to an excerpt from The Devil in the White City and a biography of Erik Larson.
The Devil in the White City Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
by Erik Larson
Hardcover: Feb 2003,
447 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2004,
464 pages.
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.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
Library Journal - Rachel Collins
Both intimate and engrossing, Larson's (Isaac's Storm) elegant historical account unfolds with the painstaking calm of a Holmes murder. Although both subjects have been treated before, paralleling them here is unique. Highly recommended.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Kirkus Reviews
Gripping drama, captured with a reporter's nose for a good story and a novelist's flair for telling it....Superb.
Booklist - Kristine Huntley
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....A magnificent book.
New York magazine
Vivid history of the glittering Chicago World's Fair and its dark side.
Esquire
So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already.
New York Times
A dynamic and enveloping book filled with haunting, closely annotated information … this truth really is stranger than fiction.
Chicago Tribune
A hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Tay WORST BOOK EVER I had to read this book for a summer assignment and it was awful. I personally don't care to read about architecture so that turned me off immediately but later it was the writing style that really made the book hard to get through. There wasn't... Read More
Rated of 5
by Sergio Villa senior sem. I thought the book was excellently written. It was both suspenseful with the story of the serial killer, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and informative with the story behind the magnificent Chicago World's Fair. Even though I wasn't alive during that time, the... Read More
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New York magazine
of 5
by Tay
of 5
by Sergio Villa
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