The End!

So, I could be getting into some trouble here by not posting anything on Devil and the White City until now when I have finished the whole book and will post on it in entirety. I'm not sure when we are allowed to post on the entire thing since we have all took much longer than "the plan" of reading this book. Anyways, I was amazed at how much I liked this book, it being non-fiction and all. To echo all of you, it did kind of read more like fiction, a lot of times I forgot that this was stuff that actually happened. Growing up near Chicago, it was so neat to hear the descriptions of the city from a hundred years ago and hear how it's changed. It was neat to hear of the buildings that are still around. I don't think I have ever been to Jackson Park or the wooded island, and now I want to take a trip out there to look around. It's very sad to me that the buildings burned down and most are no longer around since I would have loved to see it and been there. I liked in the afterword how the author said how this city was like a dream city and inspired people to see that cities could be clean and powered by electricity. It was neat seeing how minimum wages and 8-hour working days came about, and how the Ferris wheel was invented. It made me kind of in awe at the architects and engineers for imagining these wonderful buildings.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I was really interested in the parts about Holmes and wished they were longer or had more information. I wonder how many people he really killed, I definitely don't think it was 200, but I also definitely think it was more than 9. I think I probably would have fit his victim profile, I'm sure I could be flattered into not even noticing he was some serial killer. I think because it happened so long ago, I wasn't really disturbed by it. Maybe also because he mostly gased the victims to death and didn't actually slash them or kill them in a very violent way. I guess if I had to be murdered, that is the way to go. Seems pretty painless. I thought there would be a more direct tie at the end between Burnham and Holmes, but it was more the juxtoposition of the dream city and the horrible crimes that were being done in/near it. I was also sad Holmes' Castle of Horrors burned down because I won't be able to go see that either. That place definitely sounded a bit creepy. And it's weird that he was one of the first serial killers in America, around the time of Jack the Ripper. It makes me wonder, were there not really serial killers before that and people started becoming more perverted in recent years, or did we just not recognize the patterns of serial killers before then?

I was surprised at the amount of freedom that women had at that time, I tend to think of the late 1800's as being pretty oppressive towards women, but they were able to work and live by themselves and travel to big cities without family, which was impressive (all things considered.) I like how Larson wrapped up everyone's story and told us what happened to everyone in the end. It is weird how after Holmes died all those people connected to him had horrible deaths. In all, I enjoyed this book. I guess there's a Devil in the White City tour of Chicago, and now I want to go and take it to see what is still around. It definitely made me feel a lot of pride for Chicago, in regards to its pulling off the fair and all the achievements that happened as a result of that.