In the Garden of Beasts

By -
In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

It took me a while to get around to reading this; I was feeling sort of lukewarm about it.  I had seen it at work for some time, but only got to it when I needed some reading material for my lunch break one day.  After that I decided to read the whole thing.  Everyone else has already read it, so you don't need much from me!

This is the story of the Dodd family in Berlin at the dawn of Nazi power.  Mr. Dodd was appointed to be the American ambassador to Germany in 1933.  He wasn't a typical ambassadorial type, but he was determined to uphold American ideals--while keeping the Germans happy, something that in retrospect the State Department seems oddly obsessed with.  Half the book covers Dodd's constant troubles as ambassador, and the other half focuses on his daughter Martha, who fancied herself as a dangerous intellectual.

Martha seems a bit of a ninny to me; first she's completely enamored of the new Nazi regime and then, when she figures out how dangerous they are, she decides that she quite likes Soviet Russia.  She engages in affairs with the head of the Gestapo and an NKVD officer, among others.  OK, she's a headstrong young woman who doesn't think ahead much, and people in the 1930s maybe didn't realize how dangerous things were, but good golly.

What I liked about Garden of Beasts was the portrait of Germany on the edge of disaster.  That was fascinating stuff.

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM

    I'm interested in the idea of this, but I got SO BORED with the other Erik Larson book I read, I'm reluctant to jump in with another one. Dilemma.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanApril 27, 2013 at 3:37 PM

    This was my first Larson book, and indeed it was pretty slow.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more