In the Garden of Beasts

I have been raving about this newest book by Erik Larson to anyone who would listen. Having been favorably impressed by Larson's Devil in the White City when I read it a couple  years ago, I was easily persuaded by the NYTimes Book Review to hunt this book down. Focused around the 4-year term of historian William Dodd as American Ambassador to Berlin, the story of Hitler's rise to power takes on an immediate and horrifying reality. Larson has once again done a yeoman's job of research and includes excerpts from secondary and primary sources including memoirs, state documents, and even film footage and architectural blueprints. Bits and pieces of this documentation are woven into the narrative and the whole moves along so fast you can't believe it when you're done. There are abundant notes and an extensive bibliography at the end for library nerds like me. Of course all is clearer in hind sight, but the cavalier attitude of many high level politicians in the U. S. when Dodd tried to warn about Hitler is truly repulsive. They wanted Dodd out of the post because he refused to make nice after it became clear to him what Hitler really intended. Their primary concern was getting repayment of loans made by U.S. bankers to the German government, and they didn't seem to care at all about the blatant violation of civil rights in Germany. This chronologically organized and very personal perspective of the years from 1933-1937 also makes clear how Hitler succeeded in terrifying the German populace and disempowering German Jewish citizens a step at a time. Some of the parallels to more current events are unavoidably clear.