The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson
This will be our final Sticky Book of 2016. Never fear my friends, we will begin a new list in 2017.
For our 35th Sticky Book of 2016, we have the brilliant and impeccably detailed “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson. This book is fascinating, funny, and insanely researched by Larson. A film adaptation is in the works with Martin Scorcese directing and Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead. Color me intrigued. I highly recommend reading this book before it comes out, whenever that is year(s) from now.
“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. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.”
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”
“I was born with the devil in me,’ [Holmes] wrote. ‘I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”
“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
“This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.”
“His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.”
“Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.”
“Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.”
Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.
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