The Devil In the White City - Erik Larson

My mom actually recommended this book to me ages ago.  I believe two of my sisters said they had enjoyed it too.  For whatever reason I had not sought it out.  Alas, one day, there I was at Half Price Books exchanging 10 boxes of old books for $22 and considering that quite a deal (the box contained a decade+ old tax treatises from my Arthur Andersen days, multiple baseball recruiting books from the late 90s/early 00s (what do you even do with  those things when they are new???), crappy novels that I bought for cents at various sales and probably only barely enjoyed (lots of “Eh” and “Don’t Bothers” in that batch-I kept all the good books),  a stack of baby name books, a bunch of no longer relevant self help books (nope, not mine, they just showed up … I HATE self help books would not cop to owning or reading one if you tortured me) so I was just happy to have them out of my basement).  In any case, while they were logging everything in I wandered and there The Devil in the White City was on a “recommended by staff shelf” so I grabbed it.  Suffice to say, I was not disappointed to go home with only $13 in cash, having applied part of my earnings to the purchase of this book.  And, I should have listened to my mama earlier, because I very much enjoyed the book.

Its historical fiction, its nonfiction, it’s a study of architecture and a lesson on how things get done (and don’t get done) when they are organized by committee, its politics and police procedural and Law and Order SVU and human interest…it’s a lot of different things mixed up with the Chicago World’s Fair and the depravity of a madman who turned out to be a serial killer.  Fascinating.

Rating: #3 Enjoyed It Very Much