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.
Erik LarsonIt was like watching a dear friend go insane.
Erik LarsonHis weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.
Erik LarsonNo system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.
Erik LarsonLeaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.
Erik LarsonPerhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.
Erik LarsonTags: mildred-fish-harnack
There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
Erik LarsonTags: history war world-war-ii germany biography hitler
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, Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state- condoned violence. Hitler’s brown- shirted paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild, arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fi fty of these so- called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in “protective custody”— Schutzhaft—a risible euphemism. An esti-mated fi ve hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock drownings and hangings,” according to a police affi davit. One prison near Tempelhof Airport became especially no-torious: Columbia House, not to be confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called Columbus House. The up-heaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been crossed.
Erik LarsonOne portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.
Erik LarsonFor now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.
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