Erik Larson, author of the international bestseller Isaac's Storm, has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Time, where he is a contributing writer. He is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. Larson lives in Seattle with his wife, three daughters, and assorted pets, including a golden retriever named Molly.
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
I'm not usually a big nonfiction or true crime book reader, but this book has been on my shelf for years and I was finally ready to take a crack at it. I was already a little familiar with the story of H. H. Holmes and the World's Fair, but this book took "familiarity" to a whole new level. No detail was too small for Larson. Every important figure got a backstory, from the women Holmes murdered to the architects creating the White City. The story itself was fascinating and engaging; I was constantly wondering what came next, if the White City would be completed on time, what would happen to Chicago after the Fair. The two parallel story lines felt like a clever way to tying the two men and the two sides of Chicago together. I was wondering when the stories would collide, in a sense, and that unfortunately never happened. If Burnham and the other architects found out exactly what Holmes was doing under their noses (which, according to the way Larson described Holmes as a media sensation, they had to), then the architects never commented.
Burnham's story took up most of the book, and his story was a long and detailed one. At times I found myself drifting away from the longer and more technical descriptions of architecture and building, but I found that those descriptions was a way Larson went out of his way to depict what building the World's Fair was really like. I also enjoyed how Larson started with the end of Burnham's story, and then dived into this really critical period of his life, before jumping back to the end. I found that was a really compelling way to hold our attention.
Unsurprisingly, the most entertaining and chilling part of the book came with the story of H. H. Holmes. This part of the story seriously could have given me nightmares, it was so well written and scary and detailed. Larson admits to having described the killings in the way he believed they would have gone down with all the evidence available, and each of those instances felt scarily real. Larson really has a knack for writing the true crime. The two parallel stories of Burnham and Holmes felt balanced throughout the book until the very last section, when we watch the Detective discover Holmes's last atrocities. At that ending point, the story felt unbalanced in the sense that I was wondering why I had read all of that architecture history to only get an ending pertaining to Holmes. The unbalance was unsettling, because I wasn't used to reading Holmes chapters back to back, finding that it was easier to read a story of a serial killer when it was interspersed with the history of Burnham. But other than that unsettling unbalanced ending, the story of Holmes was brought to life brilliantly, and Larson's writing power cannot be underestimated.
The biggest critique I have of this novel was the lack of female depth as related to their preparing of the fair. The Women's Building has a fascinating and sexist history that I felt could have been dissected a bit further. Once the designer, who was paid so much less than the men, Sophia Hayden was sent off to get "medical treatment" because she expressed frustration. The way Larson writes about this incident was disappointing, because he did not mention that other architects sympathized with Hayden's position and supported her. While giving closure to all of his other male figures at the end of the novel, Sophia was never mentioned again after Burnham and the fair wrote her off. The other female figures, too, just didn't get the sendoff I figured they would. Throughout the book they were pegged as victims of Holmes only, and everything else felt secondary. I wish Larson would have dedicated as much research time to the women as he had the men, because it was clear there was a disparity between their representations. I also have to imagine that there were more women involved in the Fair than Larson made it seem. He had a great opportunity to share hidden stories, and he didn't. While the focus of the book was the two men and those they came in direct contact with, I still believe that he could have dedicated more focus to the women, even if he didn't want to tell the hidden stories.
You can find more Erik Larson at eriklarsonbooks.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
Comments
Post a Comment