My summer reading list will definitely include The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. It is the story of two men, one who headed the design and the construction of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, and one who
murdered a dozen or so of the visitors to that once-in-a-century sensation. The book is completely fact-based, and paints a vivid picture of end-of-century Chicago. The exhibition was Columbian because it commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. It had to be better than the 1889 world fair in France, which gave them the Eiffel tower. Of course, little did they know that the 1896 World Fair in Budapest would trump them all. (That was to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of the Magyar hordes invading the Carpathian basin. Though important to Hungarians, it was not even in the same ballpark as Chicago’s.)