Evils Imminent
In Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century amid the
smoke of industry and the clatter of trains there lived two men, both handsome,
both blue-eyed, and both unusually adept at their chosen sills. Each embodied an element of the great dynamic
that character the ruse of America toward the nineteenth century. One was an architect, the builder of man of
America’s most important structures, among them the Flat-iron Building inNew
York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.; the other was a murderer, one of the
most prolifif in history and harbinger of an American archetype, the urban
serial killer. Although the two never
met, at least not formally, their fates were linked by a single, magical event,
one largely fallen from modern recollection but that in its time was considered
to possess a transformative power nearly equal to that of the Civil War…
Beneath the
gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why
some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible,
others in the manufacture of sorrow. In
the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight
and darkness, the White City and the Black.
Source: Erik Larson, The Devil in The White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (2003) <-- Larson is the best non-fiction archival writer I know.
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