who has read the devil in the white city??

Question

do you know any websites that give summary of each part of the book.That book is way too big and i have like a week to finish.Please help me
If you read it ,if you could do anything to help me plz do so ,i will appreciate it.

Answer 1

he Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America is a 2003 book by Erik Larson. The book is a work of non-fiction, written in a suspenseful style aimed at the general reader. It details the intersection of two men's lives at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: Daniel Burnham, the architect who overcame obstacles to design and build the fair, and H. H. Holmes, a serial killer whose murder victims included numerous young women who had come to Chicago for the fair.


Plot Summary
Daniel Hudson Burnham, a young American architect, became director of works for the World Columbian Exposition and, in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, set out to build a gleaming fairground that would assert America's place in the world. Just a stone's throw away, Dr. Henry H. Holmes had his own master plan, one that involved luring young women into horrifying traps to satisfy his sadistic desires. Together, their stories - one inspiring, one bone-chilling - form a riveting portrait of a nation grappling with extraordinary technological progress and new urban threats. 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. "

"A statement wrought with melodrama from a man that could be described with equal drama as the devil incarnate...

America’s first serial killer, "Dr." H. H. Holmes comes under scrutiny in Erik Larson’s crime history Devil in the White City. Larson’s interest in Holmes, who is thought to have dispatched 27 to as many as 200 people, began as he was in the early phases of researching his soon-to-be best-seller Isaac’s Storm. Observing that Holmes was at the height of his malevolent activity while the Chicago World Fair was going on, the author was hooked. Larson says, "Taken together, the stories of how Daniel Burnham built the fair and how Dr. Holmes used it for murder formed an entirety that was far greater than the story of either man alone would have been. I found it extraordinary that during this period of nearly miraculous creativity there should also exist a serial killer of such appetite and industry." The author's statement beautifully and succinctly summarizes his book.

It is the dawn of a new age in America. Two men, each attractive -- even, magnetic, busily set about transforming their parcels of Chicago, circa 1893. Each man had his own agenda and each had a crew of workmen rendering physical reality out of what had been dreams. Each man watched hawk-eyed over every aspect of work, demanding nothing less than perfection. Each man was absuluted caught up in his own ideas, commited to his own vision of heaven -- or hell -- on earth. Unknown to both, their fates were inextricably intertwined.

Daniel Burnham, Architect

Burnham's
White City One man, Daniel H. Burnham, was the chief builder of the gleaming neoclassical White City, a beautifully planned temporary metropolis wrested from the swamps of Jackson Park, the site of the Chicago World’s Fair. The other man was H.H. Holmes, a handsome young sociopath trained in medicine, with a taste for torture and murder. As Burnham struggled against nature and bureaucracy to nurture his pristine vision to fruition, Holmes quietly and steadily erected his dark gothic "Castle" at 63rd and Wallace.







Dr. Holmes,
Serial Killer

Holmes' "Castle"
The "World’s Fair Hotel" was a bleak and ugly building. Within its confines were trap doors, secret passages, and a wooden slide that descended from the second floor to an iron vault in the basement. The basement itself housed a dissection table, a gas chamber, lime pits, and a 3,000-degree crematorium. Holmes was very particular about the heat it would reach, depending on it to incinerate all evidence of his loathesome deeds. He acquired his domain through his skill in manipulating paperwork and people. Young Dr. Holmes was a master at both.

As the hotel was being built, Holmes would regularly inspect and astringently find fault with the quality of each builder’s work. As a result of his carping, none of the workers stayed long. This served Holmes' two purposes: he never had to pay for their 'shoddy' workmanship, and the workmen literally never saw the building in its entire conception. No one but Holmes understood what the hotel would be when finished: a machine for killing.

With an enlightened age on the horizon, for the first time in America’s history, women made their way to the cities in search of work. They found apartments and lived alone, far from the watchful eyes of family. Holmes used this dynamic to his advantage. Because the hotel was so close to the Fair, many young women were persuaded to move in, many never to be seen alive again.

The World's Fair was a glowing place of magic that filled the hard-working people of Chicago with pride as they strolled the wide boulevards of the White City. To create this magic, Burnham had had a fight on his hands from the very beginning. For many months it had seemed that Chicago wouldn’t be chosen to host the fair, that the honor would go to an Eastern city.

When they’d finally won the selection committee over, the designers were determined to outdo the recent World's Fair in Paris at any cost.
Construction ran over budget and the bills stacked up.

As for outdoing the French, Burnham hoped to top the Eiffel Tower; the 264-foot high invention of an engineer named Ferris demonstrably achieved that goal.


The Ferris Wheel:
Bigger & Better than
The Eiffel Tower

Everyone involved was sure this is what would put Chicago on the map as the New York of the Mid West. Burnham rallied against harsh weather, red tape, ill health and death to make opening day a reality. The gleaming and beautiful architecture his team produced breathed new life into the neo-classical style's influence on architecture throughout America. It brought fame to the man who would go on to design the Flatiron Building and was eventually responsible for Chicago’s Miracle Mile.

Spawned in in an expansive and optimistic time, Burnham and Holmes both possessed great ambitions. Burnham's drive led him to become a form-giver of the 20th century; Holmes' drives led his victims to an excruciating death and himself to the gas chamber. As Larson himself says, "What better metaphor for the forces that would shape the 20th century into a time of monumental technical achievement and unfathomable evil?"

Larson researched the entire book himself, preferring literally a "hands-on" approach. His passion for history and keen understanding of the good and evil in man makes this more than just a history or true crime book. The style of each chapter juxtaposing Burnham with Holmes gives the reader a vivid sense of their parallel lives. We watch, riveted, as their fates unfold. In the hands of a master story-teller, the two men's lives becomes an absorbing morality tale, more captivating than any thriller."

As part of his research for ''The Devil in the White City'' Erik Larson visited the part of Graceland cemetery where members of Chicago's turn-of-the-century elite are enshrined. As he puts it, ''On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.''

Mr. Larson likes to embroider the past that way. So he relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel, complete with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing. Ordinarily these might be alarming tactics, but in the case of this material they do the trick. Mr. Larson has written a dynamic, enveloping book filled with haunting, closely annotated information. And it doesn't hurt that this truth really is stranger than fiction.

''The Devil in the White City,'' a book as lively as its title, has the inspiration to combine two distantly related late-19th-century stories into a narrative that is anything but quaint. One describes planning and preparation for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and it holds an unexpected fascination. Mr. Larson is omnivorous enough to have collected data not only on the distinguished architects who collaborated on this vision but also notes that it featured a chocolate Venus de Milo and a 22,000-pound cheese.

The book's other path follows a prototypical American serial killer whose fictional counterparts are by now ubiquitous. He built and operated a conveniently located World's Fair Hotel, complete with walk-in vault, greased wooden chute and person-sized basement kiln. As for where this would lead, ''only Poe could have dreamed the rest.''

As the book illustrates, this historical moment was ideal for the man calling himself H. H. Holmes, in honor of Sherlock. (His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett.) It was a time when young women were newly ready for travel, adventure and employment, with Chicago a place to find all three. ''Holmes adored Chicago,'' the book explains eagerly, ''adored in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she had ever existed, save perhaps a blade-thin track of perfume amid the stench of dung, anthracite and putrefaction.''

Holmes was a charmer, and a textbook psychopath when that medical designation was new. As a child he had been terrified of skeletons; as an adult, he was mysteriously able to supply them for anatomy classes. When one of his lady friends disappeared (as they were wont to do), and no witnesses recalled having seen her after Christmas Eve 1891, Mr. Larson writes that this was not precisely accurate. ''Others did see Julia again,'' he notes, ''although by then no one, not even her own family back in Davenport, Iowa, could have been expected to recognize her.''

Holmes would further prove himself the Devil of the title by publishing a saccharine, lie-filled memoir and insisting that he wanted the real killer brought to justice. He sounds uncannily prescient, but so do the book's other major figures. Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, who became obsessed with Chicago's mayor, might as well have been named Travis Bickle.

It's worth noting that Mr. Larson insisted on doing research by himself, only with firsthand sources. (No researchers, no Internet.) When he found one of Mr. Prendergast's threatening notes at the Chicago Historical Society, he says, ''I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.''

The book is no less vivid about its more solid citizens, the ones responsible for bringing the World's Columbian Exposition Company into being. Over the kind of menu that featured green turtle consommé and woodcock on toast, they laid glorious plans.

Central to the book is Daniel Hudson Burnham, a galvanizing force in shaping the huge, ornate white buildings that made the fair such a wonder. One vast structure had a floor that alone required five train cars' worth of nails.

The author has found many more odd and amazing details where that came from. The book describes the perilous birth of the Ferris Wheel (although a rival plan to outdo the Eiffel Tower called for a huge tower with a log cabin on top); the arrival of novelties like zippers and Cracker Jack; and Chicago's first glimpse of a belly dancer. Assorted ostriches, mummies, sphinxes and alleged cannibals also contributed to the ambience, which is evoked with much color. So are darker events of that time. These include ruinous financial panic and the sight of the world's most dangerous weapon: a Krupp artillery piece firing a one-ton shell.
While cataloging this exotica, Mr. Larson also keeps track of certain timeless human conditions. Workaholic organizers of the fair promise to spend more time with their families when this is over. Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated designer responsible for the fair's landscape, frets over the impossibility of achieving perfection and sinks into depression; eventually he will be hospitalized at an asylum he designed. And, when it comes to more humdrum maladies, the fair's records cite ''1 case of extreme flatulence'' and ''169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.''

Though it risks turning into a random compendium, ''The Devil in the White City'' is given shape and energy by the author's dramatic inclinations. He succeeds in affirming the historical and cultural importance of the 1893 exhibition, which, he says, may have helped to spawn such other wonders as Disneyland and Oz. And he unearths a crime story of enduring interest, if only because Holmes, in the words of The Chicago Times-Herald, was ''so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.'' A smart nonfiction writer did it instead."

Answer 2

The White Devil Sparknotes

Answer 3

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
who has read the devil in the white city??
do you know any websites that give summary of each part of the book.That book is way too big and i have like a week to finish.Please help me
If you read it ,if you could do anything to help me plz do so ,i will appreciate it.

Answer 4

Try searching cliff notes for the devil in the white city.

Answer 5

There are two Eric Larsons? Like EBP, all I know is one who made Savage Dragon. That comic was no good, too much hype and style, no substance.

Answer 6

i have