Quote:
Originally Posted by Fledchen
The author's obsession with eye color and the types of hats people wore was jarring and kept interfering with my concentration.
It seemed to me (especially considering the author's professed love of digging into primary sources for research) that Larson started off trying to write a book about Mudgett/Holmes, went off on a research tangent about the Columbian Exposition, and tried to make the two stories fit together. I grant that they were concurrent, but Larson seemed to me to be implying that Holmes wouldn't have been as successful without the backdrop of the Exposition.
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I would agree with that. I read this a while ago in dead tree format. Interesting pictures. I've seen some documentaries concentraing more on HH Holmes than the Fair which is what intrigued me. Some of them included the recordings he made while in jail. America's First Serial Killer. Very, very creepy man.
One of the things that stuck with me was that some of his victims are still hanging around medical schools, quite literally. I found that whole part intriguing in a morbid sort of way. He would have his way with the victims, then sell their articulated skeletons to medical schools. He wanted the money and they wanted the skeletons. He apparently had so many victims that they believe some are still around to this day being used in the schools.
The whole beginnings of the medical field as outlined in the book are pretty dicey. There weren't enough bodies around for the students to work on so they'd have to resort to illegal means to get more and asked little to no questions when bodies showed up at the back door in the middle of the night.
I found a lot of interesting things in this book. The products and technology that were introduced at the fair, the depths of depravity of our fellow man, many of the things that came out about medical schools of the day and the seemingly ever present police incompetance just to name a few.
I was in Chicago shortly after I finished the book a few years ago and wanted badly to go to the places in the book too. Apparently there is a post office where the murder house was that has some reports of hauntings. Now that does not surprise me. LOL I didn't end up going because it wasn't in a great part of town and I didn't want to go alone. While it was sometimes a bit hard to follow because of all the jumping back and forth, I enjoyed the book.