I had this book lying around for a while after a friend recommended it from her book club. It took me forever to get motivated to read it, but on a recent cross country plane flight I knew I needed a long and interesting book, so I brought it along. It was a good choice.

First of all, I’m not one of those people that likes reading about serial killers (who are those people?), but the two contrasting stories set in Gilded Age Chicago is actually a good set-up for a fast-paced dose of history.

I had no idea what the significance of the World’s Fair was, beyond a vague sense and this book does a great job of telling the stories behind a remarkably colossal event. Famous names like Olmstead, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the Ferris Wheel are revealed in the cliffhanger-like chapters. Interspersed between is the morbid story of killer that grows increasingly more daring and bold.

Overall, a good read and some interesting history to boot.

Great story of the 1st World’s Fair and one of America’s most evil Serial Killers. The First few Chapthers dealing with the planning of the fair kinda sucks, but every chpater on the murderer was great. Excellent book- would make a great movie or documentary.
Worth Consuming!

A wonderful non-fiction work that I have recommended to countless people. A story about an American serial killer woven into the growth of the modern city through the story of the creation of the Chicago World’s Fair – the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Intriguing. A must-read.

A great combination of the telling of the perfection of the 1893 World’s Fair and the vice of the surrounding civilization. It reminds me of the amount of trust I place in the strangers around me and how appearances can be most deceiving.

The information was very interesting, and I was entertained throughout. The writing seemed a little too earnest for me at first, but I eventually decided the style seemd to fit the setting better than a more sophisticated style. Would have been a little too dry without the serial killer element, and would have been too pulpy without all of the history of the Chicago World’s Fair.

Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City is the true story of the building of the magnificent 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago and the sociopath murderer H.H. Holmes who preyed on young women coming to see the fair. In his telling, Larson transports us to the late 1800s from when Chicago first wins the right by Congressional vote to host the fair, beating out rival New York City, through the two years it took to build the White City, to the fair itself, which brought in an estimated 40 million visitors during the short time it was open. Daniel H. Bernham, chief architect of the fair, led the extraordinary effort to build the fair, a feat no one thought could be accomplished in the time given. The fair drew the best engineers, architects, and designers the country had and forever transformed the shoreline of Chicago. The result was such a resounding success, Bernham imprinted grandeur into the minds of visitors who came from all over the country and set the course of American neo-classical architecture for the next fifty years.



A few miles away, in the Chicago suburb Englewood, a more sinister story was unfolding. Dr. H.H. Holmes built a boarding house on a full city block, complete with torture chamber and crematorium in its basement. On the first floor of the building Holmes ran a pharmacy, complete with bogus cure-alls, a restaurant, and several seemingly respectable businesses – fronts for countless fraud schemes.A handsome, arresting, blue-eyed man, Holmes charmed several women into working for him, or renting a room while in town visiting the fair. He seduced them, mesmerized them, and killed scores of them, either by locking them in an airtight vault and gassing them with poisonous fumes, or smothering them with ether-soaked rags. With several, he dissected them, removed their skin, and sold their bodies to be made into skeletons for local medical schools. He was a predator of the worst kind, a sociopath who preyed on the vulnerable, addicted to the thrill of killing.



One wouldn’t expect that the two stories – of the Fair and of Holmes – would work so well together, intermingled in their telling. But in a way, the contrast between the two draws the picture of each even more vividly. It reminds me of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where beneath the surface of a neatly manicured lawn in happy town USA, a severed finger rots. The story of the Fair shows the best of the men of the time – their engineering feats, their artistic ambition, their incredidbly hard work, their accomplishment when working united to a purpose; where the story of Holmes displays man at his worst. Larson does a terrific job weaving both tales together, and setting a pace that makes it hard to put the book down.

Recommended to me by my aunt and her sister: so far it is very good!

Rating: 3*/5

Fascinating non-fiction that reads like a thriller. Can’t put it down but don’t want it to end, either.

The details were interesting, but the book was rather dry.

I thought it would be a story type story, but it’s more of a story about how it happened. I’m liking it so far.