There’s something a little uneven about this story which simultaneously travels behind architect Daniel Burnham as he works towards organizing the realization of the Chicago World’s Fair and Dr. H H Holmes as he murders a potentially great number of people in a creepy hotel built just a few blocks from the fair (estimates run up to about 200). Most times such dual storylines are used, there is a point of convergence. Here, it is more a plane of comparison, how two people similar in background can end up in such different endplaces.

The Holmes chapters are centered around his ability to entrance people into his power, with speculations about the exact nature of his murders. The Burnham chapters are focused on the challenges of pulling the fair off on a short timeframe until the opening of the fair, when it delves into the atmosphere of the fair and the feelings of awe it evoked. These sections of the book are probably the most successful in a literary sense, as even the most unlikely parts—the first runs of the first ferris wheel for me—can be very moving.

In the end there are several chapters devoted to Holmes discovery before ending with Burnham several years later. Especially then it feels like two distinct stories, though I don’t know what else could bring them together aside from the obvious connection of the World’s Fair.

One more note: by the end of the book I was feeling tired of Larson’s technique of discussing some person or thing around the fair in a vague, tantalizing manner only to reveal the secret in one short paragraph (a la “The man’s name was _________.”)—I suppose it would have been less interesting to say it straight out, but the approach just got obvious after several usages.

I’ve been meaning to read this for several years and finally managed to get my reminder of it and a gap in reading prospects at the same time. Kozol spent a few years in the late 1980s visiting urban schools across the US, observing students, their schools and districts, and the disparities between them—centered around race and class lines. While schools have officially been desegregated since Brown v. Board of Education, the reality is that new, sneakier forms of segregation have arose in their place. Between rich districts isolated from the poorer areas around them through private incorporation and largely race-based tracking within one school and magnet schools that essentially act as publicly-funded private schools for those accepted into them, it’s hard to believe that this continues to happen, despite attempts through legislature and court rulings to change it. Late in the book O.Z. White, who I think is or was a sociology professor at Trinity University in San Antonion, TX, says,

We’re not talking about some abstraction here. These things are serious. If all these poor kids in Cassiano get to go to real good schools—I mean, so they’re educated well and so they’re smart enough to go to colleges and universities—you have got to ask who there will be to trim the lawns and scrub the kitchen floors in Alamo Heights … Folks can hope, and folks can try, and folks can dream. But those two worlds are never going to meet. Not in my life. Not in yours. Not while any of these little kids in Cassiano are alive. Maybe it will happen someday. I’m not going to be counting.

Against odds, you may hope he’s wrong, and then realize how much worse things must be now, in the era of testing as a ruler of education. In the end, you just wonder if there’s any way to change it or if racism and classism are just built into the structure of “modern society” itself.

Much like The Da Vinci Code this book appeared when I didn’t have anything to read. This is one of those few cases, where I have to say the movie is probably better than the book, at least Part I and Part II which were derived from it—tellingly, the terrible Part III was written separately, though by the same author. There are some sideplots that are given almost too much attention here (though perhaps they were less interesting because I was trying to place everything in the movies, which I haven’t seen for many years), but mostly it’s the same exact story, reordered a little bit. The movies make a lot of sense out of a somewhat rambling plot, and I think only change a few details. But though the mass market copy I have claims this is the all-time bestselling novel in publishing history, it’s not actually that well-written of a story to me, and I think I’d rather watch the movies.