I started reading this book a few months ago and couldn’t get into it but decided to give it another chance and am very glad that I did. Although the book can be a bit slow at times, well, I guess it isn’t really slow, it’s more like there’s a narrative distance, possibly given that it’s a historical novel, still in all it’s very interesting. The story of Daniel Burnham building the World’s Fair in Chicago is juxtaposed well with the darker tale of the insatiable appetite to kill that plagues Dr. Holmes. It's always interesting, to me at least, to see how callow and base some human beings can be. And It was great to read about all these notable architects and, the renowned landscape architect Olmstead, who were so influential to architecture and landscape architecture. The task of making a World’s Fair that would outdo the 1889 Paris World’s Fair weighed heavily on all those involved. The story behind the attraction that’s built to ‘Out Eiffel Eiffel’ is truly amazing. It’s interesting to note what Larsen writes in his notes and sources at the end of the book, he wanted to write a story about this fair because it’s pretty hard to comprehend a city taking on such an impossible feat and having such civic pride in this day and age. And in this modern day of litigation (oh my, all the lawyer commercials I see on TV, some are so comical in their baldness!) there is no way the attraction I tease you with would have ever been built. There, now hopefully I’ve tempted you enough to want to go read this book.
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