In the interest of seeing if any of you would be interested in this book, I'm going to throw out some key words:
Chicago. World's Fair. Architecture. Serial Killer.
This book is about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, how it came to be, how it was built, what came out of it. And an additional story about a serial killer who lived and worked within walking distance from the fair and how he took advantage of all the tourism by killing many of the tourists.
It was definitely an interesting read...but knowing what I know, I still wouldn't have picked it off the shelf. For one thing, it was very architecture-heavy. I skimmed over a lot of the too-detailed descriptions and jargon involved in designing and re-designing, the executing and re-executing, the building and re-building of the many structures involved in the Fair. But if that kind of stuff interests you, then you will LOVE this book.
Also, I wish the stories intertwined more. Obviously history can't be re-written, but it would have been way more interesting if the killer's story somehow intertwined with the magic of the Fair. But the two plots are seperate which meant I was less invested in going back and forth between the two stories.
It would have been amazing to see the Fair, though. Huge and beautiful. So many inventions came out of that fair, totally changing the course of history. I'm not going to mention them here because it's more interesting to read them in the context of that time period.
Or go see the movie due out in the next few years, rumored to be starring Leonardo DiCaprio!
