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001244d
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They saw even more ungodly things--the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima's. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed--"shredded doormat," some called it..
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Erik Larson |
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ba0ca6d
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People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.
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Erik Larson |
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06bd030
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Dodd listened intently as Hitler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by other nations. 'It was not the address of a thinker,' Dodd wrote in his diary, 'but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies.
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Erik Larson |
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91d8704
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I do not employ researchers, nor did I conduct any primary research using the Internet. I need physical contact with my sources, and there's only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness. On one such visit to the Chicago Historical Society, I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent..
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Erik Larson |
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dbbafd1
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Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.
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Erik Larson |
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09ea63f
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You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.
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madness
murder
magic
dreams
the-worlds-fair
world-fair
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Erik Larson |
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ee835f7
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It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.
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Erik Larson |
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f92175f
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I think my thought and imagination contain the picture and perceive its significance from every point of view. I have to force myself not to dwell upon it to avoid the sort of numbness that comes from deep apprehension and dwelling upon elements too vast to be yet comprehended or in any way controlled by counsel.
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Erik Larson |
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d461fc4
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Why had Holmes taken the children? Why had he engineered that contorted journey from city to city? What power did Holmes possess that gave him such control? There was something about Holmes that Geyer just did not understand. Every crime had a motive. But the force that propelled Holmes seemed to exist outside the world of Geyer's experience. He kept coming back to the same conclusion: Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insura..
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Erik Larson |
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6e7a19c
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Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture in drawing rooms, to be brought out after dinner for impromptu seances.
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Erik Larson |
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83dc6d2
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No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse's flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.
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wind
weather
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Erik Larson |
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878f3c1
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As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louv..
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world-war-1
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Erik Larson |
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7a7ace8
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As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.
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Erik Larson |
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191edf5
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The club also had the custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.
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Erik Larson |
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a86d942
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I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.' The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.
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erik-larson
the-devil-in-the-white-city
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Erik Larson |
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0338355
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One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity. Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the int..
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Erik Larson |
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e5f34f7
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Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil's comedy.
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Erik Larson |
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28c810c
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Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.
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Erik Larson |
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bc8fd5f
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why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?
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Erik Larson |
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4cc4543
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To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future," he wrote. "In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years."
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Erik Larson |
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6079f79
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But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.
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Erik Larson |
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903f019
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If I told you, you wouldn't know what I was talking about.
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Erik Larson |
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4ff6058
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The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
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Erik Larson |
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04526b8
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At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.
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Erik Larson |
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10b9782
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One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.
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Erik Larson |
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bdf018c
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She asked, what would he do if a lady happened to insist? Turner replied, "Madam, do you think that would be a lady?"
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Erik Larson |
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2212c0f
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a new phrase was making the rounds in Berlin, to be deployed upon encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street, ideally with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow: "Lebst du noch?" Which meant, "Are you still among the living?"
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Erik Larson |
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124f2d3
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In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to "a human being with his skin removed."
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Erik Larson |
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de0266d
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Burnham and Root became rich men. Not Pullman rich, not rich enough to be counted among the first rank of society alongside Potter Palmer and Philip Armour, or to have their wives' gowns described in the city's newspapers, but rich beyond anything either man had expected, enough so that each year Burnham bought a barrel of fine Madeira and aged it by shipping it twice around the world on slow freighters.
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Erik Larson |
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a39edee
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We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars," Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the "nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children."
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Erik Larson |
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ffd4cba
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Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for on..
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Erik Larson |
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4f2a2da
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Within the fair's buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison's Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla's body. They saw even more ungodly things--the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which..
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Erik Larson |
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0c7f567
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B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.
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Erik Larson |
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a8c6b46
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It had swept him, he said, "into a dream from which I did not recover for months."
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Erik Larson |
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5174727
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through the hull--the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers.
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Erik Larson |
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51a5677
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No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambas-sadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum--not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor..
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Erik Larson |
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de94a46
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No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say "D as in David," because "David" was a Jewish name. The caller had to use "Dora." "Samuel" became "Siegfried." And so forth. "There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews," Consul General Messersmith..
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Erik Larson |
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e8d85ea
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At present," he said, "I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland."
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Erik Larson |
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aaacc68
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As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.
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Erik Larson |
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e093e19
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She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. "I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for yo..
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Erik Larson |
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ecda8b7
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Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany," she wrote. "Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad--and do horrible things."
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Erik Larson |
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372bc8e
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On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray--"rather dull," as Sumner put it--and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography."
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Erik Larson |
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00d6ed0
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Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago's richest and most powerful men, the tombs' bleakness..
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Erik Larson |
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6a22d4b
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He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, "You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it WILL be lovely."
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Erik Larson |