Devil in the White City

In 1893, Chicago staked its reputation on the World's Columbian Exposition — a fair meant to outshine Paris and announce America's arrival as a global power. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City tells the story of the men who built it, centered on architect Daniel Burnham, who battled financial setbacks, engineering failures, and the death of his design partner to raise the "White City" from a swampy park in barely two years.

Running alongside that story is a darker one. H. H. Holmes, a charismatic young doctor, built a block-long building near the fairgrounds outfitted with hidden rooms, a gas chamber, and a basement crematorium. Using the anonymity of the fair's crowds — young women drawn to the city for work, tourists passing through — Holmes lured victims into his "World's Fair Hotel" and killed an unknown number of them, a case that later shaped how Americans understood the idea of a serial killer.

Larson tells both stories side by side, drawing on letters, court records, and contemporary newspapers to reconstruct the fair's engineering triumphs — the first Ferris wheel, the electric-lit "White City" itself — against the quiet horror unfolding a few streets away. It's history written with the momentum of a thriller, without inventing dialogue or events the record doesn't support.