I’ve started reading a book that recounts the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair from the factual lives of two men whose stories would be otherwise unlikely linked. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson takes a grand event in history and creates a thrilling narrative, transporting the reader into America’s past and industrial beginnings. Larson alternates between the architect of the “White City,” Daniel Burnham, and his triumph over the challenges of completing the Fair’s construction, and H. H. Holmes, the murderer who capitalizes on the Fair as a home for his destructive and illegal activities. It is an entertaining read that becomes a mystery novel within the nonfiction “biographies” of the main characters.
So glad you found Erik Larson and DWC. Two others of his, “Thunderstruck” and “In the Garden of Beasts” were tops on my list upon their releases. I would recommend those, and another great Chicago history, “Sin in the Second City” by Karen Abbott. I’ve just started Tim Egan’s “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher” about the photographer Edward Curtis (whose work you can see in Special Collections).