Daniel Burnham

"Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable."
-The Devil in the White City

A lazy haze saturates the time between Christmas and New Year's Eve. An abundance of sleep does little to wipe away the year's accumulated weariness, as Christmas leftovers and festive treats sustain you against a tide of black coffee and hot tea. The snow deserts outside and the decrescendo of the collective social calender provide a perfect escape for the readers among us to take shelter in a thick and challenging book that would be too cumbersome a read during the grind of everyday life. But what to read? My initial response to book freedom was to finish a book I had put on standby at the start of the Fall semester. The Devil in the White City proved to be a delightful and informative walk into the climate of late 19th Century America. Erik Larson cleverly intersects the challenges posed to the men behind the magnificence of the Chicago's World Fair with the madness of the country's first serial killer. Larson builds a wonderful infrastructure of understanding that will propel readers to further investigate aspects of the time that reflect their own personal interests. In my case, I was intrigued by the fair's architectural superstars and the ramifications of their decisions on the American mindset. In the book, architectural egos such as Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted and Louis Sullivan come to life as their ideas come into conflict with one another. I could not help but wonder what came of the situation in the decades that followed. This book would be well received by readers of nonfiction and fiction alike. The completion of this book still demands an answer to the earlier question presented to the readers among us in the wake of the December holidays: But what, dear readers, to read?