The Devil in The White City by Erik Larson
The overall consensus of our Relief Society book club was that this book is pretty good. Parts of the book are hard to get through because it reads a little like a history textbook, and sometimes there are so many characters that it is hard to keep track of all of them. Despite these few short-comings, the book has quite a bit going for it and was cause for some great discussion amongst the women.
One of the first things that we noted is how easily we could tell that the author is very much a connoisseur of architecture. When he writes about the elegance and the details of the buildings in Chicago and for the World's Fair, you can actually feel the love that he has for the brilliance of the men during this time in American history. Besides the authors ability to make architecture interesting for everyone, he did a great job with adding in the life of Dr. H. H. Holmes, which literally goes hand in hand with the events involving the 1893 World's Fair.
This thought lead to our next topic about how easily we as people are blinded by things in this world. Throughout the book we time and time again find that Dr. H. H. Holmes is able to hide his more primal tendencies to murder others and deceive people in all manners of life to get what he wants. He takes advantage of women, who fall in love with him. He cheats working men from the wages that they deserve even when their families may be starving, and he thieves creditors from their merchandise. All the while using his charm and comforting demeanor to fool everyone into letting him continue with the way things are. How often in life are we blinded by objects or people's charm?
Finally we moved on to just how amazing the 1893 World's Fair really was and all of the grand inventions and ideas that came from it and that still exist today. As we sat around discussing, we ate our shredded wheat, which was actually introduced at the World's Fair. We thought about the Ferris Wheel, electric lamps, Juicy Fruit gum, and many things that were not invented for the Fair, but these inventions ended up coming about concurrent to the fair. For example, the officer who anticipated the increase in crime of the city and came up with the system for identifying suspects.
Discussing and reflecting upon all of these inventions, we ended up talking about how interesting it is that technology in the world moves forward so quickly these days, and this was only able to happen after the Restoration of the church had occurred. Just think about how important it was that the gospel be restored to the Earth so that we as people could progress in our ways of living. Now look at us, sharing it all in blogs for the world to read.
The next book club will be held on September 28th at the Duckworth's house at 7pm, and we are reading Precious Bane by Mary Webb. If you have read the book or not, we would love for you to come share your thoughts. Happy readings until we meet again!
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