Dinner & A Book - The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness At The Fair That Changed America

 Erik Larson takes readers into a richly complex moment in American history, the time of the best and worst of the Gilded Age, the grandeur and triumph of the human imagination, and the poverty, violence and depravity that surrounded it.

 The book’s two most powerful figures, the great architect Daniel Burnham, and the psychopathic killer,

 Henry H. Holmes, embody the opposing forces of the age: good and evil. Burnham was responsible for building the White City (as the Fair was called), overcoming a series of crushing professional obstacles and personal tragedies to make the Fair a magical and awe-inspiring event. He brought together some of the greatest architects of the day and got them to work together to achieve an impossible project in a very brief amount of time.

 Simultaneously, in the shadow of the White City, Henry H. Holmes set up his own World’s Fair Hotel to take advantage of naïve young single women arriving in Chicago from surrounding small towns. Using his mesmerizing charm and an uncanny ability to fend off creditors and police, Holmes bent his victims to his will and committed a series of murders as cold-blooded as any in American history. The story is also about America on the threshold of the twentieth century—a time of widespread violence, fantastic wealth, growing labor unrest, and financial panic; a time when Buffalo Bill could take a bow to Susan B. Anthony;; and when Jane Addams, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Edison and Frank Lloyd Wright could gaze in wonder at the magnificence of the White City.