No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

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.