"I'll buy the peanuts and popcorn, we'll have us a ball..."

On recommendation, I picked up this book at the library:

It is almost entirely unlike anything I usually read.  It's non-fiction.  It's a true crime sort of book, about the serial killer H. H. Holmes and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the architects who planned and built the amazing structures and sights at the fair.

It was fascinating!  I had no idea about any part of the 1893 World's Fair, and this book provided a fantastic insight into how influential it was, how many things were started there that are still perpetuated.

I didn't care as much about the parallel plot regarding Holmes.  The details were vague and the twists were not very surprising.  Pretty much, if he met and married a young girl, which happened every 50 pages or so, things would take a predictably bad turn, fast.

I loved the history of the fair.  The author made the setting very real, and all the events that occurred during and bookended this time period (from the Great Chicago Fire to the Titanic) no longer seem like disconnected fables.

Some things I learned:

• Chicago has always been a corrupt, seedy, and dangerous place with terrible weather.  In over 100 years, not much has changed.
• Items introduced at or because of the World's Fair include the Ferris Wheel, Juicy Fruit, Shredded Wheat, hamburgers, zippers, organized labor and the 8-hour workday, belly dancing, that tune you sing with the words "There's a place in France..."

The architecture alone, the White City, is remarkable.  The book I have has no pictures so I had to seek them out online, which I did after I finished reading the book.  All the descriptions are so well articulated that the pictures were merely supplementary, almost thoroughly unsurprising, except for the fact that the scale of the buildings, statuary, the Ferris wheel, is unbelievable.  It's hard to grasp.  The monumental task these planners set out for themselves--and, even more incredibly, actually achieved--is beyond belief.  What a sight it must have been.

Then I looked more closely at the book I had borrowed, my library's copy.

Do you see the text at the very top of the cover?  It's hard to see. 

The title page gives a better view:

Look up above the autograph (!) to the first line.

It's an advance reader's edition of the book.  Somehow it ended up in my local library.

This is fascinating to me, too.  I've never read an advance copy of any book, and I'm very curious to know if there are any major changes to the text.  That also explains the absence of pictures and all the typographic and grammatical errors (in this one, there was a lot of shifting around between Holmes', Holmes's, and even Holme's).

Thoroughly enjoyed this one, save the clumsy Holmes denouement.  It's all quite unsatisfying, and I don't need to look so closely at such horror.

Unapologetic hubris and ginormous buildings, on the other hand...