Book of the Month

Every month the readheads pick one book that all three of us read and review. Our book for January is Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

Synopsis from Publishers Weekly:

Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city’s finest moment, the World’s Fair of 1893. Larson’s breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac’s Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes’s relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes’s co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together on an astonishingly tight two-year schedule.

Check back at the end of the month to see what we thought of this work!

• January 2010: Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way
• December 2009: George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones
• November 2009: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind