The Reich Stuff

Eilk Larson, author of Thunderstruck and The Devil in the White City, publishes a different sort of nonfic tion thriller this month. Reading In the Garden of Beasts (Crown), the story of F.D.R.'s first ambassador to Adolf Hitler's Germany, is like slipping slowly into a nightmare, with logic perverted and morality upended—Alice's Wonderland by way of Mein Kampf. Or maybe Mr. Smith Goes to Nazi Germany. Ambassador William E. Dodd, earnest history professor at the University of Chicago, arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1933, less than six months after Hitler had taken power. A trove of letters and diaries allows Larson to survey the still-coalescing Fascist state through Dodd's eyes as well as those of his 24-year-old daughter, Martha (a bit of an adventuress, she): two relative innocents with open minds and front-row seats as Germany began her descent into madness. It all makes for a powerful, unsettling immediacy. Alas, the question of how and why civilized societies debase themselves never seemstodate.

BRUCE HANDY

FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS