Devil in the White City Book Summary Essay

The Devil in the White City, written by Eric Larson, is a gripping invention of two polar opposite men during the building of the Worlds Fair in Chicago. It surrounds two characters, both extremely talented at their barter and perfectly depicts the rush for industrialization in this time. It follows the lives of Daniel H. Burnham, the fairs brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the countrys most strategic structures, and Henry H. Holmes, a serial killer who built a hotel turned torture chamber complete with a dissection table, gas chamber, and crematorium. This story is so interest because it details true life events and uses real life characters such as Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Meshing these two characters together enhances the intensity of the story and truly shows the issuing of the building of the Worlds Fair on Chicago in late 1880 and early 1890.The book begins in 1890, when Chicago is a candidate to deferral the World s Fair, or the Worlds Columbian Exposition, meant to commemorate Columus arriving in America. Daniel Burnham was responsible for building the White City. He overcame multiple crushing obstacles and individual(prenominal) tragedies to make the Fair the magical, awe-inspiring event that it was. He brought together some of the greatest architects of the Gilded Age such as Charles McKim, George Post, Ric strong Hunt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and others, and convinced them of the sizeableness of the Fair. Burnham somehow got them to work together to achieve what many considered to be an impossible project in an astonishingly short amount of time. The result of their strenuous hard work ended in a beautiful even that brought almost 40 million people to the city of Chicago and transformed the shoreline of Chicago forever.A few miles away, in the suburb of Englewood, a different kind of story was unfolding. Dr. H. H. Holmes had built a boarding house turned torture chamber on one full city block. Holmes was described as a handsome, blue-eyed charmer who had away with women. He would seduce, mesmerize, and intrigue them, all the way up until the dry pint at where he killed them. He had many ways of torture and death, such as smothering them with ether-soaked rags, of locking them in an air tight chamber and cathartic poisonous gas into them. After killing his victims, Holmes would often dissect them removing their skin, selling their skeletons to be used in medical school. He truly was the worst victim, out-of-pocket to his sociopathic mind that prayed on the vulnerable and found a certain unexplainable joy in the art of killing.