About a third of the way through the book and reading about Ambassador's Dodd's daughter's escapades, it struck me how much this was like one of the movie comedies from the same era. The upright father: befuddled and ineffective in the midst of all that is going on. The wife: equally ineffective ...
Heard the one about the architect and the serial killer? It's not a bad joke, but it is a great book. The architect was Daniel Burnham, the driving force behind the Chicago World's Fair of 1893; the killer was H.H. Holmes, a Svengali-type figure who lured young women to his hotel and did the most...
Thunderstruck, written by Erik Larson, tells the story of two men--Hawley Crippen, a hopeless romantic who falls in love with a woman that craves the thrill of trouble; and Guglielmo Marconi, a scientist researching means of communication who strays away from normality and attempts methods pertai...
It's probably more than a little shameful to admit it post-Katrina, but weather porn can be deeply satisfying. Hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, tsunamis, mudslides, styrofoam impaling oak trees, low pressure troughs, the Beaufort scale - don't you feel a little tingly already? When we combine w...
Over two decades since this book was written and sadly its still quite relevant. The book takes the story of how one boy got one gun to shoot at a school and looks at how past US decisions got us to the point where gun violence is a daily happening and yet most Americans don't even bat an eye. ...
Diels disappeared.One night in early October, Diels was working late at his office at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 when, around midnight, he received a telephone call from his wife, Hilde, who sounded deeply distressed. As he recounted in a later memoir, Lucifer Ante Portas—Lucifer at the Gate—his wi...
“Very beautiful weather,” Schwieger noted, in a 4:00 A.M. entry in his log. The boat was abreast of Sule Skerry, a small island west of the Orkneys with an 88-foot lighthouse, said to be the most remote and isolated light in the British Isles.Schwieger sailed a southwesterly course. He saw no tar...
He had been in the city all of two weeks and here he was alone in the dark, facing a storm whose intensity seemed to place it in the realm of the supernatural. The Levy Building was four stories tall and made of brick but in some gusts, Blagden said, it "rocked frightfully." Bornkessell, the stat...
Four exposition workers lost their lives, two from fractured skulls, two electrocuted. The deaths brought the year’s total to seven. The exposition’s union carpenters, aware of their great value in this final phase of construction, seized the moment and walked off the job, demanding a minimum uni...
He had an ear infection and was taking medication for it, but that did not account for his malaise. He had made big plans for the day, and suddenly those plans seemed too big. The anxiety sickened him. “I didn’t feel like going to school,” he told Detective Adams. “But I knew I would get in troub...