Larson’s lively recreation of Gilded Age Chicago is a favorite among Harvard Book Store booksellers and customers. Larson focuses his narrative on Daniel Burnham, the driven and successful architect of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who preyed mainly on young women seeking work at the Fair. Larson manages both to etch compelling portraits of these two drastically different figures and to give the reader a broader sense of this complicated moment in American history and its contradictions: the grandeur and triumph of the human imagination, and the poverty, violence, and depravity that surrounded it.
