Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I just finished reading The Devil in the White City by Eric Larsen. It’s an amazing study of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, more commonly known as the Columbian Exposition.

Created to honor the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, the fair was just as equally amazing a feat as the discovery of the New World. In fact, in its own way, it created a New World for Chicago, that Midwestern upstart of a town.

The previous World’s Fair had been held in Paris, France, and there was more than a little pressure on the creators of the Columbian Exposition to exceed the Parisian turnstile numbers, the drama of the Eiffel Tower, and the glamour. Exceed it did. The 1893 Columbian Exhibition gave the world the Ferris Wheel, belly dancing, the term “Midway,” and various unique foodstuffs. Today, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is one of the buildings that remain from the 1893 effort.

Daniel Burnham was the chief architect, in the general sense of the word, of the Exposition; and many chapters in The Devil in the White City revolve around his activities. At the same time, an approximately equal number of chapters revolve around H. H. Holmes, a sociopathic murderer at large during the same years that the book follows Burnham’s supervision of the fair. Holmes is also the devil in the book’s title. According to the author, the two men never crossed actual paths, but their stories unwittingly intertwine because of the Exposition. Today’s reader has the advantage of seeing the historical perspective.

I guess it depends on your point of view, which story is more compelling, that of the creator or that of the destroyer. In the end, however, author Larsen does a grand job of revealing both men’s lives. In the end, both men are dead. In the end, one left a lasting monument.