Monday, June 28, 2010
KEEP IN TOUCH VIA FACEBOOK!
Click the above title to visit the PGBC Facebook page. Send request to add as a friend!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
JULY MEETING RECAP!
The Pittsburgh Gay Book Club met on July 21st, 2010 at the Borders Bookstore on McKnight Road at NorthWay Mall (Near Ross Park Mall). We had a great time as we discussed the July Book selection.
Overall, the club really enjoyed reading THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Most found the intertwined stories of the two men very unique and interesting. Although one member thought it was a little cumbersome at times, and another thought it to be 'claustrophobic', there was agreement that the vast content of interesting facts and incidents made for a very compelling read. A member presented those in attendance with an original souvenir book of the actual World’s Fair featured in the book. The wealth of photographic documentation in it greatly enhanced all of our understanding and appreciation of the Fair and THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. We recommend this read to any website followers of the club!
Overall, the club really enjoyed reading THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Most found the intertwined stories of the two men very unique and interesting. Although one member thought it was a little cumbersome at times, and another thought it to be 'claustrophobic', there was agreement that the vast content of interesting facts and incidents made for a very compelling read. A member presented those in attendance with an original souvenir book of the actual World’s Fair featured in the book. The wealth of photographic documentation in it greatly enhanced all of our understanding and appreciation of the Fair and THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. We recommend this read to any website followers of the club!
JULY BOOK SELECTION:
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by ERIK LARSON
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed.
LINK TO THE BOOK AT BORDERS.COM
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