The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.

Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as “Cleckley” psychopaths.