The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson

The year is 1893, and the plains city of Chicago is deep in preparation for the 1893 World's Fair. Formerly a city known for pork processing, Chicago is intent on reinventing itself as a cultural landmark on par with Paris and New York. However, it soon became known for something far more sinister - America's first serial killer, H.H. Holmes.

The book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America had a pretty ambitious goal. Larson wanted to talk about the 1893 World's Fair, a cultural event that had a huge impact on American culture that can still be felt today, and he also wanted to talk about H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who took advantage of the World's Fair to pursue his evil intentions. The book is divided into two separate, intertwining narratives drawn from a series of letters, diary entries, and other resources. In one narrative, Larson covers how Chicago came to host the World's Fair and the various preparations the city had to undertake to pull off the humongous event. In the other narrative, the reader is treated the the lurid details of the infamous H.H. Holmes and his murder-trap The World's Fair Hotel. There is also a third sub-narrative about a how a political assassination happened at the Fair, but it's treated as less important than it probably was at the time.

Unfortunately, this book failed to properly interweave the narratives for me. Although Larson tries repeatedly to draw comparisons between Holmes and the main architect of the Fair, Daniel Burnham, the two never encounter each other or even seem to be aware of each others' existence. Every time Burnham is brought up, the narrative focuses (entirely too much) on his partner John Root's ill health and how the stress of creating the fair exacerbated the issues he suffered from. It was a real effort to focus on anything involving Burnham's accounts, and after a while, I just skimmed those chapters. Holmes's chapters were more interesting, but then again, he is a serial killer and this case was so strange and new at the time that it's hard not to be fascinated by this disturbing person.

The book isn't without interesting stories and tidbits of information, though. As I said, the World's Fair had an enormous impact on American culture. The 1893 World's Fair is where we got the Ferris wheel, which was originally an attraction meant to rival Paris's Eiffel Tower from a previous World's Fair. The site itself was home to many artful works of architecture and landscaping, and a new-fangled technology, alternating current, was used to turn the elegant and fanciful buildings into a wondrous heavenly citadel by night. This book makes heavy use of primary resource materials, so you really get the feeling that you're right there at the Fair.

Ultimately, this book isn't what the jacket blurb made it out to be. It's interesting, but parts of it are hard to slog through. It's thoroughly researched, and what the author couldn't find out directly, he made some pretty convincing speculation of (for instance, the thoughts and reactions of Holmes's victims in their final moments). The narrative about the architects was interesting, but after a while I got tired of reading about complaints about bad digestion and what-not. As I mentioned earlier, there was a third sub-narrative about a political assassination, but honestly it was treated like a side-story, like, "Oh, this happened at the same time, too." I got the feeling that either there wasn't enough research material to work with in order to treat it more like an integral part of the story that Larson was telling, or he was told that the book was too long and he had to cut something out. However, if that were the case, I think he should have completely cut that part out instead of giving this kind of half-baked recounting of the events leading up to it.

This book was made into a movie a few years back. I haven't gotten around to seeing it, but I'm sure that they pared the material down quite a bit and linked the narratives a little better than Larson did. There is so much information in this book, and so many individual stories that you could easily spin off into, that it would make for a pretty entertaining and educational mini-series, too.

I wouldn't recommend this to casual readers, though. It's not paced very well, and sometimes it feels like a lot of information is just dumped on you like a textbook. However, architectural history buffs and casual history fans might enjoy this, as it gives a lot of detail of the event and era while also providing "characters" to latch onto and follow through from start to finish.