The Devil in the White City

The Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, shredded wheat, alternating current, and the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry all have their origins in the World’s Fair that was held in Chicago over 100 years ago.

Erik Larson, the author who wrote In the Garden of Beasts, brings all of these little details to life in telling the story of how the 1893 World’s Fair came to be. As with Garden of Beasts, he intricately weaves the story of myriad people and events into an intricate and coherent narrative, which he tells with great precision, down to the smallest details. From a rivalry with New York to the need to “out Eiffel Eiffel,” and the architects’ frustrations with one another, Larson places the reader in Chicago in the last decade of the 19^th century. 

The city he creates is dark, dirty, and often bloody, a far cry from the beautiful city Daniel Burnham predicts will rise and that I love so well. Larsen writes that it was so very easy to disappear in this place, and no small part of the book focuses on one individual who was responsible for an untold number of those disappearances. Herman Webster Mudgett, perhaps the most infamous Michigan grad after the Unabomber (and a corpse theft while still a medical student), quietly goes about engaging in one long crime spree, swindling, defrauding, and especially disappearing one young woman after another.

I enjoyed this book very much, and was so enthralled by the whole scenario that I had a hard time putting it down. (I read it in less than three days.) As in Beasts, Larson does a great job of capturing both the macro-level factors of the time – labor unrest, a plunging stock market, societal shifts in attitudes toward women – and the micro level factors – how the first Ferris wheel was built, for example, and what Infanta Eulalia ate when she visited the fair.