Burnham vs. Holmes

 "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing...I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."

Dr. H. H. Holmes, confession, 1896

 You would think that a man who says that he has the devil in him would not have much in common with a Daniel Burnham. Burnham being an architect, and the chief builder of the White City, wanted to make something bigger and so much better than Paris's Eiffel Tower. Chicago and New York were at a race to who will get the most votes to hold the World's Fair in their city. Finally the votes were in and Chicago won by a landslide. So Burnham and Toole, his side man, helping him with anything and everything, were both chosen to help create, map out, and build the World's Fair in Chicago. This could make them millions and millions of dollars or it could completely break them if they have a catastrophe in the fair. The World's Fair was a place of magic. Filling the hard-working people of Chicago with pride and happiness as they walked down the streets full with joyous people and their children.
 Dr H. H. Holmes was a handsome young sociopath trained in medicine, with a lust for torture and murder. He lived on 63rd street and Wallace street, in a dark gothic "Castle" built in the World's Fair. This serial killers "castle" was a bleak and ugly building. But once someone travels inside it becomes a building with trapped door, secret passageways and a wooden slide that goes in to an iron vault that would travel down in to the basement. In Holmes basement was home to a dissection table, a gas chamber, lime pits, and a 3,000-degree crematorium. He received the house he lives in through his skill in manipulating paperwork and people. Young Dr. Holmes was a master at both. This domain was a killing machine that Burnham was building just for him. No else could understand what the hotel could become except for Holmes. Women started to come to the city for work. But lived in apartments far away from their family. But because the hotel was so close to the Fair, many young women had been persuaded by others to move in, and many were never to be seen alive again.
 Erik Larson's melodramatic novel is genius. The book is trying to give you an understanding of the good and evil in a man that makes this more than just a true crime book. The each chapter's style is juxtaposing Burnham with Holmes giving the reader a vivid sense of their parallel lives.

"Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow"  ~Erik Larson

The juxtaposition of these two men is a look in to the nature of men and their own ambitions. Both are attractive, they both have their own agenda, both very particular about their work, Both fates were intertwined.