Nothing else puts the ingenuity and the horror of human intelligence more than the fact that at the same time that some of the brightest men were conjuring up the greatest fair in history, there was a man not 3 km away from them who was employing his mind in the service of the destruction of the human spirit.
Being an architect myself, I enjoyed these stories about the Columbian Expo thoroughly, understanding everything in detail and finding myself awed at almost every page. The parallel story about Holmes is my first detailed look into his life, and I must say there were definitely new insights there that I hadn’t already known from the many YouTube videos that I have seen over the years. The writing style, understandably, might feel jarring for some, but I liked the constant switching in pov between the fair and the hotel. It helped the narrative from being too lopsided and provided breathing room for the two separate stories to sink in.