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Product Details
Two ways to buy!
$7.49
Audible Editor Reviews
The Devil in the White City actually starts as two different stories that the author gradually stitches together into one captivating whole. Both stories are engaging on their own, but the true pleasure of this book comes in the way the author seamlessly interweaves not only the plotlines and characters of the two stories, but the symbols and deeper meanings as well. In the novel, Larson deftly places a depraved serial killer into the true historical backdrop of the race to build a revolutionary world-class exposition. Larsen does an extraordinary job of making these captivating historical facts resonate with meaning. And Scott Brick enhances the tension with his typically insightful and resonant narration. Like the stories themselves, their teamwork combines to make The Devil in the White City a unique and highly recommended treat for the ears and the mind.
Publisher's Summary
In a thrilling narrative showcasing his gifts as storyteller and researcher, Erik Larson recounts the spellbinding tale of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
The White City (as it became known) was a magical creation constructed upon Chicago's swampy Jackson Park by Daniel H. Burnham, the famed architect who coordinated the talents of Frederick Olmsted, Louis Sullivan, and others to build it. Dr. Henry H. Holmes combined the fair's appeal with his own fatal charms to lure scores of women to their deaths. Whereas the fair marked the birth of a new epoch in American history, Holmes marked the emergence of a new American archetype, the serial killer, who thrived on the very forces then transforming the country.
In deft prose, Larson conveys Burnham's herculean challenge to build the White City in less than 18 months. At the same time, he describes how, in a malign parody of the achievements of the fair's builders, Holmes built his own World's Fair Hotel - a torture palace complete with a gas chamber and crematorium. Throughout the book, tension mounts on two fronts: Will Burnham complete the White City before the millions of visitors arrive at its gates? Will anyone stop Holmes as he ensnares his victims?
© 2003 Erik Larson; (P) 2003 Books on Tape, Inc.
What the Critics Say
- Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner, Fact Crime, 2004
"A hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private." (Chicago Tribune)
"Vivid history of the glittering Chicago World's Fair and its dark side." (New York Magazine)
"Both intimate and engrossing, Larson's elegant historical account unfolds with the painstaking calm of a Holmes murder."(Library Journal)
From AudioFile
A guilty pleasure is this true story of nineteenth-century serial killer Henry Holmes, as it relates (with some stretch of credulity) to the Colombian Exposition of 1893, erected on Chicago's Southside, not far from Holmes's lair. The author, who writes more like a carnival pitchman than an investigative reporter, fills his account with fascinating detail, and even when the detail isn't fascinating, he tries to make it so with florid description. Scott Brick attacks this material with relish, narrating with a sardonic edge and masterful attention to phrasing. Okay, he should have looked up the pronunciation of "phaeton," "calumet," and a few other terms, but if we pretend not to notice, we'll have a lot of perverse fun. (c) AudioFile 2003
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