The Chicago Exposition and the Sideshow

Devil in the White City is my first Erik Larson, and a good place to start. When I travel I like picking up a book with some local connection, ideally in the local language if I can read it. My wife went to Chicago last year and brought this one back as a souvenir.

The book follows the making of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with H. H. Holmes, a serial killer, added as a sideshow.

I have no real defense against this kind of material: the Victorian era, giant projects, ambitious weirdos, and the early outlines of people who later turn into American monuments. Walt Disney gets mentioned in passing. Buffalo Bill hosts a show at the exposition. George Ferris invents the Ferris wheel to outdo the Eiffel Tower. They have all now been quietly moved into the role model project.

It is historical nonfiction, though it often reads like a novel that did too much research. It’s a bumpy ride, the book, not the Ferris wheel. It goes from person to person, project to project, anecdote to anecdote, without truly elegant transitions. It doesn’t sound that promising. Here it mostly worked, though, because nearly every chapter had me doing a Wikipedia search and “losing” half an hour in some rabbit hole.

The Holmes material never fully belonged to the same book, even though it gave the book its title. At first it intrigued me. But in the end it felt bland. It felt like a 2-for-1 deal, without being a good deal. Holmes should probably have his own book, instead of drifting through this one.

Still: very worth reading. The side quests I collected alone justify it. Next up, probably a Walt Disney biography and something on the tycoons Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. I might also pick up another Erik Larson, as long as Holmes stays out of the way.