Erik Larson
Erik Larson
Erik Larsonis an American journalist and author of nonfiction books. He has written a number of bestsellers, such as The Devil in the White City, about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair; The Devil in the White City also won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, among other awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 January 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.
Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.
When I read that, ... I realized that maybe this guy was not quite the hero history has made him out to be.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I sense a deep seam of sorrow in Galveston for the way things have turned out. It was such a glittering little city in 1900, with the promise of becoming another San Francisco or New Orleans,
My job is to ... sort of guide them through the negative and positive energies in their life and erase the barriers and increase the strength so they can accomplish their goals.
Now the city's most treasured landmarks are those that existed before the storm. The city has gone from one that looked forward to one that sees its happiest times in the past.
We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?
There was this great sense of hubris that America and Galveston -- Galveston in particular --was going places, could do no wrong, ... Isaac's Storm.
The broader message is that technological hubris will always get you in trouble with nature.
He embodied the hubris that so marked the last turn of the century when America believed it could do whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, and could even override nature.
There is a difference in what is focused upon, and the degree of disturbance that the person presents with,