Book Review of: In the Garden of the Beasts

Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

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Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles.

This book has a good writing style, but suffers from "where's the beef?" syndrome. While the book is enjoyable from a reading standpoint, it left me disappointed due to its (mis)focus and seeming indifference to the important events occurring around the family about which it's presumably written.

The author maintained my interest by teasing with suggestions of events to come, but routinely failed to deliver. The book contains many short chapters that end with a remark to the effect that so and so would find out such and such was a big mistake. But you read on and nothing happens. This cliffhanger without a cliff routine got old after the first few times.

Given the subtitle, I expected to read about how this family coped with Nazi Germany, and what specifically they coped with. Though this was a family of four, we read mostly about one member of the family. That member is the daughter, who apparently was ahead of her time because she celebrated "free love" before it became a fad in the 1960s. We read little about the mother or the brother.

The father, Dr. Dodd, was the US ambassador to Germany during the core period covered by this book, yet we find little of substance about what he actually did. Mostly, he writes letters that are simply ignored by higher-ups back home. He got little support from the Secretary of State, a situation that would seem worthy of more exploration and explanation.

Certainly, Dodd was in a position to observe and record far more of the story than what Larson provides in this book. Dodd was, by training and practice an historian. Yet we readers are left with precious little of the story Dodd might have told about his time in Germany during the rise of Hitler. To me, this seems like a glaring hole in the book. That is, unless one assumes Dodd is merely a character incidental to the story of Dodd's daughter's dalliances.

Larson does describe a few events, most notably the SA purge. His coverage of the SA purge is anomalous for the book, due to its detail a and relevance to the historical period in question. Yet, the subtitle promises this sort of story for the whole book.

Clearly, Larson missed an opportunity to create a work that truly informed the reader. While this work may help some readers understand more about the events that gave rise to Hitler, the author mostly just made Nazi Germany just a backdrop for talking about the daughter's crazy love life. Much of that has to do with Boris, who worked in the intelligence operations of the USSR. Larson provides ample detail about these two lovers, but provides almost nothing about what her parents thought of this. Boris may as well have been a native German pastry chef.

Now, consider the situation. The daughter of the US ambassador to Germany, during the rise of Hitler, is openly engaging in an affair with a man who works for the intelligence operation of the USSR. Larson gives the impression that the ambassador apparently didn't connect the dots here. It's just not plausible. The reason for omitting the father's viewpoint is the book should have been subtitled, "The love life of the daughter of the US ambassador to Germany during the rise of Hitler." That was the focus of the book. Edit out the false cliffhangers, and you still have a book of little historical interest. But at least it would deliver on its promises.

Yes, I am demanding much more of the book than the author delivered. But my reasons for that should now be clear at this point. That said, this book wasn't painful to read. The writing style was direct and clear, the text was devoid of grammatical errors, and I don't recall encountering factual errors except for Larson's great exaggerations of Goering's obesity. If you read Larson's descriptions and then look at Goering's photos, this will be readily apparent.

And I did like the few bright spots of "not just the daughter's love life" in the book. For example, the account of Goering's tour gave me new insight about Goering (although, as noted, his physical description was inaccurate).

A feature I like in documentary and "based on a true story" movies is the "what became of them" riff that such movies typically offer at the end. So I was pleased that Larson included an epilogue that let us know what happened to various people in the book. Amazingly, several lived into their 90s and one died at 102.

The text of this book is 365 pages long. That said, some of those pages are blank. And for each year covered, there's a page that has the year on one side and is blank on the other. And there are short chapters that leave quite a bit of blank page space. So I'm estimating about 300 pages of text. The pages inside the front cover are printed with a map of the Tiergaren, 1933; the rear with a map of Berlin (presumably the same period). Larson wrote six pages on "Sources and Acknowledgements," and he has 56 pages of notes. The book includes 11 photos, and is indexed.