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July Book Club
Monday, July 12, 2004
7:00 PM
Location:
Silver Diner
3200 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22201
Metro: Clarendon (Orange Line)
Phone: 703.812.8600
Silver Diner Website
Book for JULY: The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson
From Publishers Weekly
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888
London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched
somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in
the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred
during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of
1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly
factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within
it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance
between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's
relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are
compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the
frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star,
architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the
thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair
together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural
charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to
coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid
debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is,
in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which
might be
called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than
anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new
opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public
anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be,
meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp
of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a
semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh
unnoticed. 6 b&w photos, 1 map.
For more information, email bookclub@dchoos.org
Click here to purchase or read a review of July's book...
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July Book Club
Monday
July 12, 2004
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