Erik Larson's Devil in the White City

My blog is almost a two-for-one discount.

I'm thinking about about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair through two books.... Erik Larson's Devil in the White City, as well as my adventure rescuing Shepp's World's Fair Photographed.

Devil in the White City itself is "two-for-one;" it's about how the Fair was imagined, constructed, enjoyed, and destroyed.... AND about the psychopathic serial killer Henry Holmes.

Things that had their "firsts" at the World's Fair:

• Kellogg's Shredded Wheat
• Aunt Jemima pancake mix
• Cracker Jack
• Juicy Fruit gum
• Pabst Blue Ribbon
• the zipper
• Extensive electric lighting (200,000 bulbs, illuminated by alternating current, instead of direct current)
• Belly dancing in America

(By the way... that "snake charmer" song?
NOT an Arab/Persian song at all..... it was thought up on the spot by Sol Bloom, Director of the Fair Midway)

and ... 

• the Ferris Wheel

The White City was enormously difficult to build.  It involved the greatest architects of late-19th century America.  One of the buildings, if it were still standing, would be the 3rd largest building in the world.... even today.  The World's Fair was otherworldly for visitors.  It was a triumph for Chicago, trying to prove that they were more than America's Slaughterhouse.  It buoyed the spirit of a nation on the verge of an economic depression (1894) and the massive strikes by newly-organized labor.

And then there was America's first serial killer.

In the madness of the booming city, sometimes people simply vanished without a trace, walking away from whatever life they wished to leave behind. So Chicago of 1893, filled with hundreds of thousands of visitors and temporary workers, was a perfect place to ensnare and kill - especially naive young women new to the life of the metropolis.  Herman Webster Mudgett (who used MANY aliases, but was best known as Henry Holmes) was handsome, charismatic, and entranced everyone he met .  He could convince workers not to be paid, creditors not to collect.  He married again and again, and his wives "disappeared."

He bought a lot close to Jackson Park and built his "castle" - part retail space, part apartment space, part office space, part hotel, and part death machine.  He designed every feature - bizarre hallways, gloomy rooms.... and soundproof iron vaults, windowless airtight chambers (piped with hidden gas jets), a dissecting lab, and a crematory kiln. Holmes purported to be a doctor and pharmacist, so residents and guests never questioned the pervasive smells of chloroform and acid.  At the time, cadavers for academic use were hard to come by, so his pals helped him dispose of bodies, for profit - four of which became articulated skeletons at Cook County Hospital Medical School.  Erik Larson's depiction of him is so frightening - Holmes began to plan their deaths... to happen months later.... the same day he met them.

Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl, Benjamin Pietzel and three of his children, Emeline Cigrand, Minnie Williams and her sister Anna.  And on and on. It took years and dozens of disappearances, for their families to begin to admit the unthinkable.  An unstoppable detective, Frank Geyer, searched dozens of cities, followed thousands of leads, and built the case against Holmes. 

Some estimates put the number of Holmes victims at as many as 200.  Chilling, indeed.

Erik Larson has a new book out; I'm very eager to read In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.  Yikes.

Now 120 years in the past, the Chicago World's Fair really did leave its mark on America in small and large ways.

Elias Disney was one of thousands of workers who built the White City.  Although it burned to the ground in 1894, Elias told his little son Walt marvelous stories about it - how happy it made the people who visited.  Disney theme parks and The White City have a LOT in common in terms of architectural and landscape design, exhibits, and the goal of being "The Happiest Place on Earth."  Because for a brief shining moment, the White City WAS The Magic Kingdom.

Note: only a handful of the marvelous buildings of the Exposition still exist.  One particularly grand one is now the Museum of Science and Industry on the banks of Lake Michigan in Chicago.  And another is the "Maine State Building," which you can see today in Poland Springs!

Today, I am not the 95%

Today is a milestone.   The Maine Page Turner turned ONE!

Last year I attended a speaking engagement by Mike Volpe, a specialist in new media and social network marketing.  Of everything he said, this sentence was the one that really stuck with me:

"Ninety-five percent of blogs peter out within a year."

Besides providing you with (hopefully) something interesting to read, I have been determined to beat that statistic.  And I have you, my dear readers, to thank for these 365 days of success - and beyond.  When I've struggled with what to read or write about next, I think about you, anticipating my next post.  I want to give you something interesting, or funny, or sad, or just something to ponder.  I know you are reading, and I love your feedback.  That means so much to me.

A few statistics: I've reviewed 39 books since the launch of The Maine Page Turner.  Only 14 of those are off "The Shelf Project."  I'm easily distracted.  Squirrel!



(Sidebar: you've probably noticed that I'm slightly obsessed with Pixar.  Yes, it's true.)

I'm planning some new things for the days ahead. Hold onto your hats!

Vikings just want to have fun

I'm willing to bet that every time you read about the Vikings in school, they were always the "other guys" or the "bad guys."  Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom, the first in his (thus far) six-book Saxon Stories, turns that on its head.

It's 866. Bebbanburg Castle is taken by the Danes. The Earl is killed, and ten-year-old Uhtred of Bebbanburg (fictional character based on an historical person) becomes a captive.

But here's the thing.  Uhtred doesn't really seem to like much about Saxon (aka English) life anyway.  With some arm-twisting, he learns to read & write. He spends more time than he'd like at Mass or other prayer.  He finds most of the priest/teachers/tutors in his Saxon life pretty insipid.  He is a second son, and during his first ten years, he seems on the (unhappy) path to priesthood.  But when his father and his older brother are killed by the Danes, things change.

Dane Earl Ragnar takes a shine to Uhtred and adopts him.  Uhtred relishes Dane life.   Vikings really know how to party.  There's plenty of sacking, pillaging, but also a lot of feasting, storytelling and mystery.  Sexual mores are much more relaxed; Uhtred and his childhood friend Brida become sexual partners in their teens, scandal-free.  He connects more easily to Thor and Odin than the Christian god, preferring the tangibility and power of Thor (the lightning god) rather than the meekness of Christ.  It's a lifestyle well-suited to a "man's man," someone who would rather be a chieftain and warrior than a scholar. Possessing an excellent sword, and knowing how to use it properly, is essential. Fierceness and bravery rule the day.  

Don't we have these people in our lives too?  I think about my son, who is a bright boy, and he does just fine in school, but would MUCH rather be moving.  He doesn't want to sit and read; he wants to ride his bike, climbs trees, play contact sports, wrestle and rough-house.

None of this excuses the vicious attacks by Danes against civilians (notably Lindesfarne), especially unarmed nuns and monks.  But brutality was not uncommon among any population at this time (the Christian rulers weren't peace-loving non-combatants!).

Dane life is active; Saxon life is "civilized."  But not everyone wants to be civilized.  Uhtred certainly doesn't.  It's dull.  History is written by the victors, in this case, the Saxons/English.  Whatever redeeming qualities the Danes may have - a laissez-faire attitude toward teen sexuality, a culture that honors combat and adventure above nearly all other things - these have been filtered out of our history.

Uhtred identifies with both the Saxons AND the Danes.  It makes him a distinct and believable character.  He has reasons for loyalty on BOTH sides of the conflict.  An interesting balancing act indeed.

Refreshing to read historical fiction that is sympathetic to "the other side."  Makes me want to hang out in a mead hall!

Things Fall Apart

Published in 1958, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart tells of the tragic undoing of Okonkwo, a proud man living in a village in the Niger River valley in the era of Europe's African colonization. 

Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things.  He was still young but had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages.  He was a wealthy farmer and had barns full of yams,and had just married his third wife.  To crown it all... he had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars.  And so although Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. (p. 8)

Pride goeth before a fall (Proverbs 16:18), but it is far more than Okonkwo's pride that unravels this world.

Not every one is a winner....

Last weekend I asked DS to pick out my next book from my Assignment Shelf.  Any book should be a winner, right?  These have already been hand-selected by me!

Well, I guess there's always going to be a dud.  I read the first 125 pages of Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter, and I did what I NEVER do.... I stopped reading it.


Not like, "Hmm, I'm not in the mood right now, I'll pick it up again later."  No, I quit the book.  I didn't like any of the characters, I couldn't bear hearing her describe baby hands as "stars" or "starfish" one more stinkin' time, and I couldn't get past the fact that there was a church memorial service for the "dead" baby, and supposedly a grave, but no death certificate?  No one inquired after the baby's body? 


And this is a BIG DEAL because I consider a novel to be all-of-a-piece, like a painting.  Remember Cameron staring at A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte ? He gets so close that all he can see is dots.  A novel, to me, is like those thousands and thousands of dots in a Pointilist painting.  You have to stand back and consider the whole thing.



So I did it, I broke my own rule.

My husband laughs that I will be reading a book, grumble that I hate it, but continue to read it.  It  takes more willpower - a conscious choice on my part - to PUT IT DOWN.  I slogged through Middlemarch in the '90s, not for a class, but "for fun."  I started it because a respected friend told me it is one of her favorite books of all time; I finished it because I felt that I owed it to George Eliot (and to my friend) to do so.  I didn't like Love in the Time of Cholera, but I kept reading, thinking, "It'll get better." And as with George Eliot, I felt like it would be disingenuous for me to dismiss Gabriel García Márquez unless I'd read the WHOLE thing (who the hell am I to judge them?). I'm dead honest here: the last two pages of Cholera were my favorite, and not just because it meant I was finished (thank god!) but because I actually enjoyed them in a way I did NOT enjoy the other 250 or so.  But was it worth keeping on?  No, I don't think so.

I know Memory Keeper's Daughter was a bestseller, but I don't follow the crowd on reading all that much anyway (yes, I read Twilight Book 1, and no, I didn't like it).  I know from my GoodReads friend list that more than a couple of people who read this blog really loved this book.  Bring on the say-it-ain't-so....

Sigh.  I'm just not a "chick lit" kind of girl. A while back I read Sue Monk Kidd's second novel, The Mermaid Chair, and LOATHED it (I kept reading that one because I was on a trip and it was the only book I had brought with me). The Secret Life of Bees is also on The Shelf. Wonder how I'll do.  More to come.

"We don't need no stinkin' badges....."

I have a weird relationship with books that have award badges on the cover.  On the one hand, I feel like I should be guaranteed a good read because someone smarter/more influential than me, or, more likely, a whole committee of someones, thinks this is great writing.  On the other hand, there's ALL kinds of politics that go into the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer, Booker Prize, National Book Award, etc.  All kinds of insider wrangling, I'm sure.  And just because it's their cup of tea (or Three Cups of Tea) doesn't mean it's mine.


So when I picked up Olive Kitteridge, I wasn't sure if I was in for a reward or a disappointment.

Verdict: REWARD!  And this was a vacation read, so I had the decadent opportunity to read the whole book in under 24 hours (mostly with sand between my toes).  Even better.


I love, love, LOVE how we are introduced to Olive by the people around her in town.  Her family, her students, her friends (she's a crusty codger, but she does have friends, even in spite of herself).  It's not until much later in the book that we start to see Olive from Olive's perspective.  And it's so gradual, I hardly even noticed it until days after finishing the book!


Fun to hear Maine and New England place names bandied about - in a fictional way.  She goes shopping at the So-Fro at Cook's Corner.  First, you will only know where Cook's Corner is if you're from a pretty small radius around Brunswick, and OMG, I can remember tagging behind my own mother at So-Fro (there used to be a So-Fro INSIDE the Maine Mall.... can you even imagine it today? "Yeah, the So-Fro is right near Justice and Abercrombie & Fitch....")


Olive is vivid in my imagination.  Strout is from Maine, and she got the Maine "vibe" absolutely right.  The language, the culture, a certain "how things are done" here.  We aren't a colder version of The American South.  Maine is unique.


BIG recommend!

Where the heck have I been?

When I launched this blog, I promised myself that I would stick with it.  So where have I been this last month?  Well, reading.... a LOT (and knitting a lot, but I digress), but not ready to blog about some of it.

I finished Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in February.  I gave it one star on GoodReads. I didn't like it, no, I did not.  All the characters were unlikeable.  The physical self-mutilation was horrifying, the emotional self-mutilation was just plain sad.  And there was a certain squishy, clammy realism about humanity that was kind of nauseating to me. 
I can't understand Hazel Motes' "Church of Christ without Christ" - what is the POINT??  Is he an atheist?  Is he reacting against the evangelical Protestantism and itinerant preaching of the South?  Reacting against World War II?  The loss of his home & family?  All of it??

  I loved O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find in the early 1990s.  Maybe it's a better book (short stories, really) or maybe I am different now.  Anyway, I wouldn't have been as wild about Flannery if I'd read Wise Blood first. I admire that it was likely a radical book when it was first published in 1949, but I just didn't enjoy the Southern Gothic existential malaise.

Onward. 

Finished Jeffrey Eugenides Virgin Suicides a couple of nights ago.  I think Eugenides is quirky good.  I liked Middlesex when I read it a few years ago (almost 6 years ago!  Time flies!).  This one wasn't quite as gripping somehow, but let's face it, it was his debut book!  I think the author is completely fascinated with the lives of women and girls... especially the hidden aspects of life.  The "narrator" of this work is a male peer of the girls.... the desperation of wanting to know, to SAVE the girls is palpable.  I think Eugenides wants to know everything about women.  By Middlesex I think he allowed himself to become one, if only in his imagination, but vividly so!  Are we really that interesting and mysterious?

This book was pretty angst-y too, I mean, they all kill themselves (no spoiler there... note the title), but it wasn't just the girls giving up on life, it was their house, falling down around their ears, and even the elms, dying on their street.  The girls were prisoners to their parents' over-protective behavior.  Perhaps it's a morality play: Mom & Dad hold onto their daughters so tightly, they crush them to death.  Making Lux burn her records won't stop her from loving rock 'n' roll; keeping her locked in the house won't even keep her from finding a long list sexual partners.  One CAN'T control another person.  There might be the temporary appearance of control, but eventually it will end - and quite possibly, BADLY.

I've read four books that I'm not ready to blog about yet: "The Hunger Games" trilogy (I'm on Mockingjay, Book 3 of 3), and Dennis Lehane's "Kenzie & Gennaro" mysteries (on Book 3 of 6).  I know I'm always late to the party, but WOW.  I read A Drink Before the War and Darkness, Take My Hand in about three days each.  Each of these series is all of a piece, so it makes sense to treat them as such. 
Bear with me between entries!

For the Inquiring Mind

Want to play along at home?  Here's my list, alphabetized. 
(Yeah, I'm that girl.)

Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
Anonymous, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son
Bohjalian, Chris, Midwives
Bowles, Paul, The Sheltering Sky
Bushnell, Candace, Sex and the City
Cleave, Chris, Little Bee
Cornwell, Bernard, The Last Kingdom
Crafts, Hannah (edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr), The Bondswoman’s Narrative
Crowley, John, Little, Big
DeLillo, Don, White Noise
Dubus, Andre III, House of Sand and Fog
Dunn, Katherine, Geek Love
Dunn, Mark, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
Edwards, Kim, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
Enger, Leif, Peace Like a River
Erdrich, Louise, Love Medicine
Eugenides, Jeffrey, The Virgin Suicides
Ferrucci, Franco, The Life of God (as Told by Himself)
Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Funke, Cornelia, Inkheart
Garland, Alex, The Beach
Gordon, Mary, Spending
Harrigan, Stephen, The Gates of the Alamo
Hazzard, Shirley, The Great Fire
Hulme, Keri, The Bone People
Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ishiguro, Kasuo, The Remains of the Day
Johnson, Charles, Middle Passage
Keller, Nora Okja, Comfort Woman
MacDonald, Ann-Marie, Fall on Your Knees
Mattison, Alice, The Book Borrower
Maugham, Somerset, The Painted Veil
McBride, Jame, Miracle at St. Anna
McCann, Colum, Let the Great World Spin
McEwan, Ian, The Comfort of Strangers
Millhauser, Steven, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye
O’Brien, Tim, In the Lake of the Woods
O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried
O’Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood
Oates, Joyce Carol, Expensive People
Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient
Paolini, Christopher, Eragon
Pearl, Matthew, The Poe Shadow
Proulx, E. Annie, Accordion Crimes
Randall, Alice, The Wind Done Gone
Roth, Philip, American Pastoral
Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America
Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things
Rushdie, Salman, The Enchantress of Florence
Russo, Richard, Empire Falls
Sapphire, Push
Schlink, Bernhard, The Reader
See, Lisa, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Shaffer, Mary Ann & Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Shteyngart, Gary, Absurdistan
Strout, Elizabeth, Olive Kitteridge
Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina
Wangerin, Walter, J, The Book of the Dun Cow
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth
Whitehead, Colson, The Intuitionist
Xingjian, Gao,  Soul Mountain
Zola, Emile, Nana

Barnet, Sylvan, A Short Guide to Writing About Literature

Birkerts, Sven, The Gutenberg Elegies
Bryson, Bill, A Walk in the Woods
Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood
Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed
Grier, Katherine C., Pets in America: A History
Honoré, Carl, In Praise of Slowness
Kenyon, Olga, 800 Years of Women’s Letters
Kurlansky, Mark, Salt: A World History
Larson, Erik, The Devil in the White City
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Schumacher, E.F., Small is Beautiful
Truss, Lynne, Eats, Shoots, & Leaves
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale
Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States

House of Sand and Fog

Finished last night.... late!  If you read my previous post, you've learned that it took me some time to warm up to House of Sand and Fog.  It didn't truly grip me until Part II.

What a sad tale.  Now I know why Dad said the film was so sad, and that I've sort of avoided this book. 

 Warning, spoiler alert. 

I don't typically cry while reading (although I OFTEN cry while watching films), but I had tears in my eyes for this ending....  the whole thing was a disaster for everyone involved. 

Shakespeare would have liked this.  It reminded me of Othello.  One small misunderstanding starts a chain of events that end in total tragedy. 

And even along the way, there are moments when the characters could have made different choices and had a different outcome.  Kathy and Lester doubt each other (and rightly so, it's a flash of passion, I don't think it would have lasted the "long haul).  Kathy gets blind drunk, Lester stews around and then invades the house.  Behrani could have gone for the gun when he had the opportunity instead of telling himself, "if I have to think about it, I'm too old." And on and on and on.

Reading Esmail's death really hurt.  I could feel the hurt, because I can't imagine how destroyed I would be if my only son were killed.

Despair over and over again.  Choices born from despair.
Kathy seems resigned to her fate in the end.  It's almost as though she's found a family that accepts her unconditionally - for the first time.

Soraya is the only survivor of the Behrani family.  This family of survivors - during the Iranian Revolution, of all things - is the victim of bureaucracy and rage and passion and impulsiveness in the end.  And her reaction is invisible to us.  We will never know.

So, no happy ending this time.

Or next time, it looks like.

Instead of sticking with the original plan of having DH pick the next book, I foolishly allowed 10-yr-old (sadistic?) DS to do so.  Next up: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  I think he wants to see me suffer - not because of a plot, but through 823 pages.  My reaction to my next assignment, well, he thought that was just a laugh riot.

See you in the spring.....

My own assignment

If nothing has clued you in yet, I'm a book fiend.  I read about fifty books each year.  I've challenged myself to read this:

Yep, all these books (well, except for the dictionary and thesaurus on top - that would be silly ;-).  For the element of surprise, I've asked my husband to select (assign?) the books to me.  (I don't think there'll be any science to it, probably something like the first one he grabs.)

None of these are brand new.  In fact, none of them were even purchased new.  ALL of them were gotten "frugally," at GoodWill (the GoodWill on the South Portland/Scarborough line has a CRAZY good book section) or at used book stores or library sales.  My financial investment is minimal, my emotional investment is significant.

So don't expect any hot-off-the-presses reviews, but I'll post about each one as I finish.  It'll keep me on task.  And it's good for me to write about literature.  I used to do it well; maybe I can still muster up mediocre.

Book #1: Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog.  I've had this copy for some time, and I've NOT watched the film (because I also have a personal rule that I need to read the book FIRST).  But when the film was in theatres, my parents saw it, and Dad remarked, "What a sad, sad movie."  Very uncharacteristic for him to be emotional about a film.

At the end of House of Sand and Fog I'll let you know if I'm drenched in tears.  It could happen.