Wide-Eyed Reader

I'm not much of a nonfiction reader, really, but I just couldn't resist this one - history, Chicago (my favorite American city), and one of the most interesting murder stories I've ever heard of? Of course I had to read it! CHARACTERS As The Devil in the White City  is a history, and not a novel, this is a bit harder to talk about than in most of my reviews. As everyone discussed in the book was a real person and all of it is drawn from fact more heavily than in historical fiction, I cannot comment on how well-developed the characters were, but on the quality of writing. I felt that I understood the two characters Larson focused on, Daniel Burnham the architect and H. H. Holmes the murderer - as much as I could understand them, given the historical distance. Larson did an excellent job showing these people as rounded, and makes an effort to explore the depths of their minds. Even those who are not the focus of the book get plenty of room to seem like robust portrait...