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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Excellent book about an era that we can't afford to forget. Looking back, William Dodd was a strange choice as FDR's choice for ambassador to Germany. With hindsight, we could say, "What was FDR thinking?" However, his choice reminded me when the Taliban first gained worldwide notice. The Clinton administration said, "We can work with these people." FDR as well as the rest of the world hoped that Hitler was a rational actor. Well, guess what? He wasn't. Then there's Dodd's daughter, Martha. A real piece of work. Careening between affairs with Nazi's, bourgeois french and Russian communists. Crazy stuff. Larson sketches a detail rich tableau, wonderfully researched. You can't make this stuff up.
informative
medium-paced
dark
informative
tense
medium-paced
I really loved Larson's Devil in the White City, and I was interested to read his interpretation of the well-known Nazi era. True to my expectations, I found this story very intriguing, and I had a hard time putting it down. I didn't find it particularly suspenseful (probably because we all know how this ends up), and it's not a history of World War II or Hitler, so the story ends rather abruptly before the United States even becomes involved in the war. However, as it is written mostly based on accounts from Ambassador Dodd and his promiscuous daughter Martha (neither of whom I had even heard of before reading this book), it lends a new perspective and at least partly sheds some insight on how the U.S. and basically the whole international community "let" Hitler do what he did. Overall, I felt it to be a very worthwhile read.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Excellent book. It gave a chilling portrait of 1930's Germany and the ways foreign governments decided to look the other way while Hitler took complete power. It read rather like a fictional thriller - building up to a final battle between good and evil - but with the added layer that you knew it really happened.
What a strange time to read this book: smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and hopefully in the final year of Trump's presidency. That is the lens with which I read "In the Garden of the Beasts." It struck me how little has changed in the last 70 to 80 years. We humans blithely live our shallow little existences. We keep busy. We keep our heads down. We take for granted our freedoms and our social "agreements." Then, not so suddenly—because there are always warning signs—we find ourselves in a crisis and our house of cards comes fluttering to the ground.
Adolf Hitler was a virus and the Third Reich was a global pandemic costing the world hundreds of millions of lives. There were symptoms: brutal beatings, persecution of Jews, and a population fervently falling in line. In 1933, academic and historian, William Dodd, the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Germany was a bed-side eyewitness as the Nazi plague took hold of a nation.
As with "The Devil in the White City," Erik Larsen's account is well researched and the narrative is compelling. I really enjoyed learning about the early years of Hitler's rise and consolidation of power.
Adolf Hitler was a virus and the Third Reich was a global pandemic costing the world hundreds of millions of lives. There were symptoms: brutal beatings, persecution of Jews, and a population fervently falling in line. In 1933, academic and historian, William Dodd, the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Germany was a bed-side eyewitness as the Nazi plague took hold of a nation.
As with "The Devil in the White City," Erik Larsen's account is well researched and the narrative is compelling. I really enjoyed learning about the early years of Hitler's rise and consolidation of power.
Very good historical account of the years 1933-37 in Germany.