Erik Larson

by A.D. Amorosi

books

Like Oliver Stone and Baz Luhrmann battling to see whose Alexander the Great movie will come first, a Zeitgeist of sorts has fallen over "The White City": the infamous circus-within-a-circus that was the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. First-time author Alec Michod may have found dark, flashy thrills in his more recent, fictitious take on the Fair's chaos in The White City (St. Martin's). But Erik Larson -- author of the remarkably fierce and equally fact-driven tale of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, Isaac's Storm -- fuses history and histrionics into one fine reference book called The Devil in the White City (Vintage). Making spectacular facts even more spectacular is hardly a new sport. But Larson does well, molding the true tale of that "town's" architect, Daniel H. Burnham, with the rumors-and-reality of that era's most formidable (and first) serial killer, "Dr." H. H. Holmes. Combine the pair's linked stories with Larson's wealth of contemporaneous eccentrics (Bill Cody, P.T. Barnum, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Thomas Edison, Frank L. Baum), and what you wind up with is a skillfully rendered pastiche of the real and surreal a la Stone's JFK. Alternating between chapters that reveal Burnham's and Holmes' intricately intertwined stories allows their own considerable achievements, charms and horrors to unravel (Holmes built his own architectural monument -- the crematorium-, suffocation vault- and gas-chamber-filled World's Fair Hotel; Burnham was a madman driven to create his own quickly built monstrosities at any cost). Larson is a meticulous detailer, not only of two men's arch ambitions but of America -- a nation willing to suffer all manner of foolishness and evil in its hunger to succeed. In this, the era of Bush's win-at-any-cost wars, Larson's right on time.

Erik Larson reads, Tue., Feb. 24, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.