In the Garden of Beasts

I just finished, and am immediately re-reading, Erik Larson's new book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. I don't usually finish a book and head straight back to the beginning, but something drove me back. You see, I read it on my Kindle, and as with Unbroken, another recent read (also about World War II, this time in the Pacific), I relied on the little "percentage read" graphic on the bottom of the screen as I barreled along at a quick pace. When I reached the end of the book somewhere in the 70+% range (the rest of the book contained sources and footnotes and an index), I realized that I had been reading too quickly, looking for something that would bring the entire book together--maybe some hidden depths to be found in the two main characters, Ambassador William Dodd and his daughter, Martha, who I found naive and gullible and kind of boring even as they came to understand the horrors awaiting Germany and the world as the 1930s progressed. But there wasn't anything like that, so I had to go back to the beginning to spend a bit more time with the many other fascinating personalities Larson includes in this work.

It is for the portraits of those people that you should read this book. Röhm...Diels...even Hitler himself. It's a good book, though not as gripping page-by-page as Larson's The Devil in the White City. Or perhaps it just can't follow up Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which is one of the best books I have read in recent years.