Book of the week: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

Using journals and other writings, Larson re-creates the experiences of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who took the post just as the Nazis were consolidating power.

(Crown, $26)

It’s one thing to recognize evil when one sees it, said Mary Ann Gwinn in The Seattle Times. In Erik Larson’s “eerie and disturbing” new account of an American family’s venture to 1933 Berlin, the question that lingers is how one might recognize when an evil is actually implacable. With his latest best seller, the author of The Devil in the White City has re-created the experiences of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who brought his wife and their adult daughter, Martha, with him when he took the post just as the Nazis were consolidating power. It can be “hard to warm up to the well-meaning but outmanned Dodd and his feckless, flirtatious daughter,” the two figures whose journals and other writings provide Larson his grist. But “as a work of popular history, Beasts is gripping—a nightmare narrative of a terrible time.”

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