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The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
February 2004
On Sale: February 10, 2004
447 pages
ISBN: 0375725601
EAN: 9780375725609
Kindle: B000FC0ZIA
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
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.
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