In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

Description: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitlers rise to power. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitlers rise to power.The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes Americas first ambassador to Hitlers Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the "New Germany," she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitlers true character and ruthless ambition.Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror. Author Biography ERIK LARSON is the author of the national bestsellers Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaacs Storm. ErikLarsonBooks.com Review #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARWASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARNPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEARO, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEARUSA TODAY 10 BOOKS WE LOVEDPUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEARKIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEARNEW YORK TIMES, JANET MASLINS TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEARSEATTLE TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEARTHE WEEK BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEARGLOBE AND MAIL VERY BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARAMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION INDIE BOOK OF THE YEAR"By far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history….Powerful, poignant…a transportingly true story." —New York Times"Reads like an elegant thriller…utterly compelling… marvelous stuff. An excellent and entertaining book that deserves to be a bestseller, and probably will be." —Washington Post"The most important book of 2011." —O, The Oprah Magazine"A dazzling amalgam of reportage….Reads like a suspense novel, replete with colorful characters, both familiar and those previously relegated to the shadows. Like Christopher Isherwoods Berlin Stories or Victor Klemperers Diaries, IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS is an on-the-ground documentary of a society going mad in slow motion." —Chicago Sun-Times"Fascinating...A master at writing true tales as riveting as fiction." —People (3 1/2 stars) "Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds intimate witness to Hitlers ascendancy and created an edifying narrative of this historical byway that has all the pleasures of a political thriller….a fresh picture of these terrrible events." —New York Times Book Review"Larson, a master of historical nonfiction, has written a fascinating book that, although carefully researched and documented, reads like a political thriller...highly recommended to anyone interested in the rise of the Third Reich and Americas role in that process." —Jewish Book World"Larsons strengths as a storyteller have never been stronger than they are here, and this story is far more important than either "The Devil in the White City" or "Thunderstruck." How the United States dithered as Hitler rose to power is a cautionary tale that bears repeating, and Larson has told it masterfully." —Cleveland Plain Dealer"Larson has done it again, expertly weaving together a fresh new narrative from ominous days of the 20th century." —Associated Press"Mesmerizing...cinematic, improbable yet true." —Philadelphia Inquirer"Compelling...the kind of book that brings history alive." —USA TODAY"[G]ripping, a nightmare narrative of a terrible time. It raises again the question never fully answered about the Nazi era—what evil humans are capable of, and what means are necessary to cage the beast." —Seattle Times"A stunning work of history." —Newsweek"Tells a fascinating story brilliantly well." —Financial Times"A cautionary tale not to be missed." —Washington Times"Highly compelling...Larson brings Berlin roaring to life in all its glamour and horror...a welcome new chapter in the vast canon of World War II literature." —Christian Science Monitor "Terrific storytelling." —Los Angeles Times"Vivid and immediate...a fascinating and gripping account." —Washington Independent Review of Books"Gripping...a story of stunning impact." —New York Daily News"Larson is superb at creating a you-are-there sense of time and place. In the Garden of Beasts is also a superb book...nothing less than masterful." —Toronto Globe and Mail "Harrowingly suspenseful." —Vogue.com "Larson has taken a brilliant idea and turned it into a gripping book." —Womens Wear Daily"A gripping, deeply-intimate narrative with a climax that reads like the best political thriller, where we are stunned with each turn of the page." —Louisville Courier Journal"Electrifying reading...fascinating." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune"Larsons books are tightly focused and meticulously researched, but they also are rich in anecdote and detail from the homey mundane to the tragic, the absurd and the downright funny. His prose has an austere, compassionate lyricism. His narratives have novelistic pull...his psychological perception and empathic imagination lend flesh to the documents, music to the ballrooms. He gives a throbbing pulse to the foolish and the wise, the malignant and the kind." —The Oregonian"A masterly work of salacious nonfiction that captures the decadent and deadly years of The Third Reich." —Mens Journal"Even though we know how it will end — the books climax, the Night of the Long Knives, being just the beginning, this is a page-turner, full of flesh and blood people and monsters too, whose charms are particularly disturbing." —Portsmouth Herald "Larsons latest chronicle of history has as much excitement as a thriller novel, and its all the more thrilling because its all true." —Asbury Park Press"Larson succeeds brilliantly…offers a fascinating window into the year when the world began its slow slide into war." —Macleans"Larsons scholarship is impressive, but its his pacing and knack for suspense that elevates the book from the matter-of-fact to the sublime." —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review"[A] brilliant tour de force of nonfiction writing...Larson, as always, conjures magic with the details, and often injects a welcome dollop of dark humor...In the Garden of Beasts serves as both a serious, insightful look at history, and a stern warning against national complacency when youre being run by a dictator who is both vicious and undeniably off his rocker." —Dallas Morning News "Like slipping slowly into a nightmare, with logic perverted and morality upended….It all makes for a powerful, unsettling immediacy." —Vanity Fair"A master of nonfiction storytelling...Larson once again gathers an astounding amount of historical detail to re-create scene after vivid scene...a stunning, provocative immersion...a call to citizens in all nations to investigate the motives of power brokers and government officials, to stand our ground when we see others moral compasses going awry." —Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram"Excellent." —Salon.com"No other author...has the ability to actually live up to that old adage of making history come alive. What Larson is doing is creating a world that no longer exists on the page...[He] not only succeeds but is able to turn what one would expect to be tedium into page-turning brilliance." —Digital Americana"Narrative nonfiction at its finest, this story drops into 1933 Berlin as William E. Dodd becomes the first U.S. ambassador to Hitlers Germany—a tale of intrigue, romance, and foreboding." —Kansas City Star"One of the most popular history books this year...offers something for both serious students of the 1930s and for lovers of charming stories." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch"Erik Larson tackles this outstanding period of history as fully and compellingly as he portrayed the events in his bestseller, The Devil in the White City. With each page, more horrors are revealed, making it impossible to put down. In the Garden of Beasts reads like the true thriller it is." —BookReporter.com"In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City...a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "An excellent study, taking a tiny instant of modern history and giving it specific weight, depth and meaning." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)"A brilliant and often infuriating account of the experiences and evolving attitudes of the Dodd family during Hitlers critical first year in power. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the Dodds seem almost criminally ignorant, but Larson treats them with a degree of compassion that elevates them to tragic status." —Booklist (Starred Review)"Larson writes history like a novelist...conveying quite wonderfully the electrically charged atmosphere of a whole society turning towards the stormy dark." —The TelegraphPraise for Erik Larson THUNDERSTRUCK"A ripping yarn of murder and invention." —Los Angeles Times "Larsons gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale." —The Washington Post Book World"Gripping….An edge-of-the-seat read." —People DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY"[Larson] relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel….a dynamic, enveloping book."—The New York Times"A hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private. Exceedingly well-documented, exhaustive without being excessive, and utterly fascinating."—Chicago Tribune "An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep-defying fiction." —Time Out New York ISAACS STORM "A gripping account…fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true." —New York Times Book Review"Superb...Larson has made the Great Hurricane live again." —The Wall Street Journal"Gripping….The Jaws of hurricane yarns." —Newsday Review Quote "By far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history….Powerful, poignant…a transportingly true story."-- The New York Times "Tells a fascinating story brilliantly well."-- Financial Times "Highly compelling...Larson brings Berlin roaring to life in all its glamour and horror...a welcome new chapter in the vast canon of World War II."-- Christian Science Monitor "Terrific."-- Los Angeles Times "A stunning work of history."-- Newsweek "Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds intimate witness to Hitlers ascendancy and created an edifying narrative of this historical byway that has all the pleasures of a political thriller….a fresh picture of these terrrible events."-- The New York Times Book Review "Larson has taken a brilliant idea and turned it into a gripping book."-- Womens Wear Daily "Harrowingly suspenseful." Vogue.com "A gripping, deeply-intimate narrative with a climax that reads like the best political thriller, where we are stunned with each turn of the page."-- Louisville Courier Journal "Electrifying reading...fascinating." Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Larsons latest chronicle of history has as much excitement as a thriller novel, and its all the more thrilling because its all true."-- Asbury Park Press "A superb book...nothing less than masterful."-- Toronto Globe and Mail "Even though we know how it will end - the books climax, the Night of the Long Knives, being just the beginning, this is a page-turner, full of flesh and blood people and monsters too, whose charms are particularly disturbing."-- Portland Herald "Larson succeeds brilliantly…offers a fascinating window into the year when the world began its slow slide into war."-- Macleans Magazine "Erik Larson tackles this outstanding period of history as fully and compellingly as he portrayed the events in his bestseller, THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. With each page, more horrors are revealed, making it impossible to put down. IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS reads like the true thriller it is."-- BookReporter.com "Larsons strengths as a storytellerhave never been stronger than they are here, and this story is far more important than either "The Devil in the White City" or "Thunderstruck." How the United States dithered as Hitler rose to power is a cautionary tale that bears repeating, and Larson has told it masterfully."-- Cleveland Plain Dealer "Reads like an elegant thriller…utterly compelling… marvelous stuff. An excellent and entertaining book that deserves to be a bestseller, and probably will be."- The Washington Post "Larsons scholarship is impressive, but its his pacing and knack for suspense that elevates the book from the matter-of-fact to the sublime."-- Pittsburgh Review "A master at writing true tales as riveting as fiction."-- People (3 1/2 stars) "Larson has done it again, expertly weaving together a fresh new narrative from ominous days of the 20th century."-- Associated Press ""Mesmerizing...cinematic, improbable yet true."-- Philadelphia Inquirer "[L]ike slipping slowly into a nightmare, with logic perverted and morality upended….It all makes for a powerful, unsettling immediacy."--Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair "Dazzling….Reads like a suspense novel, replete with colorful characters, both familiar and those previously relegated to the shadows. Like Christopher Isherwoods Berlin Stories or Victor Klemperers Diaries, IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS is an on-the-ground documentary of a society going mad in slow motion."-- The Chicago Sun-Times "[G]ripping, a nightmare narrative of a terrible time. It raises again the question never fully answered about the Nazi era-what evil humans are capable of, and what means are necessary to cage the beast."-- The Seattle Times "In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City...a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery."-- Publishers Weekly(Starred Review) Praise for Erik Larson THUNDERSTRUCK "A ripping yarn of murder and invention."- Los Angeles Times "Larsons gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale."-The Washington Post Book World "Gripping….An edge-of-the-seat read."- People DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY "[Larson] relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel….a dynamic, enveloping book." - The New York Times "A hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private. Exceedingly well-documented, exhaustive without being excessive, and utterly fascinating." - Chicago Tribune "An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep-defying fiction."- Time Out New York ISAACS STORM "A gripping account…fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true."- New York Times Book Review "Superb...Larson has made the Great Hurricane live again."- The Wall Street Journal "Gripping….The Jaws of hurricane yarns."- Newsday From the Hardcover edition. Excerpt from Book CHAPTER 1 Means of Escape The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago. Now chairman of the history department, Dodd had been a professor at the university since 1909, recognized nationally for his work on the American South and for a biography of Woodrow Wilson. He was sixty-four years old, trim, five feet eight inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and light brown hair. Though his face at rest tended to impart severity, he in fact had a sense of humor that was lively, dry, and easily ignited. He had a wife, Martha, known universally as Mattie, and two children, both in their twenties. His daughter, also named Martha, was twenty-four years old; his son, William Jr.--Bill--was twenty-eight. By all counts they were a happy family and a close one. Not rich by any means, but well off, despite the economic depression then gripping the nation. They lived in a large house at 5757 Blackstone Avenue in Chicagos Hyde Park neighborhood, a few blocks from the university. Dodd also owned--and every summer tended--a small farm in Round Hill, Virginia, which, according to a county survey, had 386.6 acres, "more or less," and was where Dodd, a Jeffersonian democrat of the first stripe, felt most at home, moving among his twenty-one Guernsey heifers; his four geldings, Bill, Coley, Mandy, and Prince; his Farmall tractor; and his horse-drawn Syracuse plows. He made coffee in a Maxwell House can atop his old wood-burning stove. His wife was not as fond of the place and was more than happy to let him spend time there by himself while the rest of the family remained behind in Chicago. Dodd named the farm Stoneleigh, because of all the rocks strewn across its expanse, and spoke of it the way other men spoke of first loves. "The fruit is so beautiful, almost flawless, red and luscious, as we look at it, the trees still bending under the weight of their burden," he wrote one fine night during the apple harvest. "It all appeals to me." Though generally not given to cliche, Dodd described the telephone call as a "sudden surprise out of a clear sky." This was, however, something of an exaggeration. Over the preceding several months there had been talk among his friends that one day a call like this might come. It was the precise nature of the call that startled Dodd, and troubled him. For some time now, Dodd had been unhappy in his position at the university. Though he loved teaching history, he loved writing it more, and for years he had been working on what he expected would be the definitive recounting of early southern history, a four-volume series that he called The Rise and Fall of the Old South, but time and again he had found his progress stymied by the routine demands of his job. Only the first volume was near completion, and he was of an age when he feared he would be buried alongside the unfinished remainder. He had negotiated a reduced schedule with his department, but as is so often the case with such artificial ententes, it did not work in the manner he had hoped. Staff departures and financial pressures within the university associated with the Depression had left him working just as hard as ever, dealing with university officials, preparing lectures, and confronting the engulfing needs of graduate students. In a letter to the universitys Department of Buildings and Grounds dated October 31, 1932, he pleaded for heat in his office on Sundays so he could have at least one day to devote to uninterrupted writing. To a friend he described his position as "embarrassing." Adding to his dissatisfaction was his belief that he should have been farther along in his career than he was. What had kept him from advancing at a faster clip, he complained to his wife, was the fact that he had not grown up in a life of privilege and instead had been compelled to work hard for all that he achieved, unlike others in his field who had advanced more quickly. And indeed, he had reached his position in life the hard way. Born on October 21, 1869, at his parents home in the tiny hamlet of Clayton, North Carolina, Dodd entered the bottom stratum of white southern society, which still adhered to the class conventions of the antebellum era. His father, John D. Dodd, was a barely literate subsistence farmer; his mother, Evelyn Creech, was descended from a more exalted strain of North Carolina stock and deemed to have married down. The couple raised cotton on land given to them by Evelyns father and barely made a living. In the years after the Civil War, as cotton production soared and prices sank, the family fell steadily into debt to the towns general store, owned by a relative of Evelyns who was one of Claytons three men of privilege--"hard men," Dodd called them: "...traders and aristocratic masters of their dependents!" Dodd was one of seven children and spent his youth working the familys land. Although he saw the work as honorable, he did not wish to spend the rest of his life farming and recognized that the only way a man of his lowly background could avoid this fate was by gaining an education. He fought his way upward, at times focusing so closely on his studies that other students dubbed him "Monk Dodd." In February 1891 he entered Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Virginia Tech). There too he was a sober, focused presence. Other students indulged in such pranks as painting the college presidents cow and staging fake duels so as to convince freshmen that they had killed their adversaries. Dodd only studied. He got his bachelors degree in 1895 and his masters in 1897, when he was twenty-six years old. At the encouragement of a revered faculty member, and with a loan from a kindly great-uncle, Dodd in June 1897 set off for Germany and the University of Leipzig to begin studies toward a doctorate. He brought his bicycle. He chose to focus his dissertation on Thomas Jefferson, despite the obvious difficulty of acquiring eighteenth-century American documents in Germany. Dodd did his necessary classwork and found archives of relevant materials in London and Berlin. He also did a lot of traveling, often on his bicycle, and time after time was struck by the atmosphere of militarism that pervaded Germany. At one point one of his favorite professors led a discussion on the question "How helpless would the United States be if invaded by a great German army?" All this Prussian bellicosity made Dodd uneasy. He wrote, "There was too much war spirit everywhere." Dodd returned to North Carolina in late autumn 1899 and after months of search at last got an instructors position at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He also renewed a friendship with a young woman named Martha Johns, the daughter of a well-off landowner who lived near Dodds hometown. The friendship blossomed into romance and on Christmas Eve 1901, they married. At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South "was altogether right in seceding from the Union." The backlash was immediate. An attorney prominent in the veterans movement launched a drive to have Dodd fired from Randolph-Macon. The school gave Dodd its full support. A year later he attacked the veterans again, this time in a speech before the American Historical Society in which he decried their efforts to "put out of the schools any and all books which do not come up to their standard of local patriotism." He railed that "to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man." Dodds stature as a historian grew, and so too did his family. His son was born in 1905, his daughter in 1908. Recognizing that an increase in salary would come in handy and that pressure from his southern foes was unlikely to abate, Dodd put his name in the running for an opening at the University of Chicago. He got the job, and in the frigid January of 1909, when he was thirty-nine years old, he and his family made their way to Chicago, where he would remain for the next quarter century. In October 1912, feeling the pull of his heritage and a need to establish his own credibility as a true Jeffersonian democrat, he bought his farm. The grueling work that had so worn on him during his boyhood now became for him both a soul-saving diversion and a romantic harking back to Americas past. Dodd also discovered in himself an abiding interest in the political life, triggered in earnest when in August 1916 he found himself in the Oval Office of the White House for a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. The encounter, according to one biographer, "profoundly altered his life." Dodd had grown deeply uneasy about signs that America was sliding toward intervention in the Great War then being fought in Europe. His experience in Leipzig had left him no doubt that Germany alone was responsible for starting the war, in satisfaction of the yearnings of Germanys industrialists and aristocrats, the Junkers, whom he likened to the southern aristocracy before the Civil War. Now he saw the emergence of a similar hubris on the part of Americas own industrial and military elites. When an army general tried to include the University of Chicago in a national campaign to ready the nation for war, Dodd bridled and took his complaint directly to the commander in chief. Dodd wanted only ten minutes of Wil Details ISBN030740885X Author Erik Larson Short Title IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS Language English ISBN-10 030740885X ISBN-13 9780307408853 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 943.086 Illustrations Yes Series Broadway Books Subtitle Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitlers Berlin Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-05-01 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-05-01 NZ Release Date 2012-05-01 US Release Date 2012-05-01 UK Release Date 2012-05-01 Pages 480 Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Random House Inc Replaces 9780307952424 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:44134321;

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