This is a wonderfully readable and entertaining book. A caveat: Before you start reading it, look up Goebbels and Goring in Wikipedia. Having some sense of them as individuals may make it possible for you to keep them straight while you're reading the book. I'm pretty good at keeping the cast of characters straight in almost anything I read (I didn't struggle with 100 Years of Solitude, for instance) but I was pretty confused here. It's the story of a University of Chicago history professor who became FDR's ambassador to Berlin (a job no one else wanted, it seemed) and that of his daughter, a "free spirit". A few oddities. This is the story of a father and his daughter, though their relationship is not the story told in this book. Mom and Junior don't really figure much in this history. The first year of the Dodds' residency in Berlin is recounted in great detail; the rest of their story is barely summarized. The Dodds are real American characters in both the best and worst ways, I would say. To me, I would say that his ambassadorship gave him an opportunity to do something heroic which ended his career as an ambassador but which he would never had had an opportunity to do had he stayed in Chicago. And, that are many episodes in this book that are chilling. So it's not for everyone. Also, I personally thought that the first two chapters' exposition dragged. Oddly, for all that exposition, I thought that Larson should have offered some definition of the term "Jeffersonian democrat" and considered the question of whether Dodds' work as an ambassador was affected by his self-image.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson
This is a wonderfully readable and entertaining book. A caveat: Before you start reading it, look up Goebbels and Goring in Wikipedia. Having some sense of them as individuals may make it possible for you to keep them straight while you're reading the book. I'm pretty good at keeping the cast of characters straight in almost anything I read (I didn't struggle with 100 Years of Solitude, for instance) but I was pretty confused here. It's the story of a University of Chicago history professor who became FDR's ambassador to Berlin (a job no one else wanted, it seemed) and that of his daughter, a "free spirit". A few oddities. This is the story of a father and his daughter, though their relationship is not the story told in this book. Mom and Junior don't really figure much in this history. The first year of the Dodds' residency in Berlin is recounted in great detail; the rest of their story is barely summarized. The Dodds are real American characters in both the best and worst ways, I would say. To me, I would say that his ambassadorship gave him an opportunity to do something heroic which ended his career as an ambassador but which he would never had had an opportunity to do had he stayed in Chicago. And, that are many episodes in this book that are chilling. So it's not for everyone. Also, I personally thought that the first two chapters' exposition dragged. Oddly, for all that exposition, I thought that Larson should have offered some definition of the term "Jeffersonian democrat" and considered the question of whether Dodds' work as an ambassador was affected by his self-image.
Monday, May 21, 2012
The Wagon by Martin Preib
I found out about it because a friend took a course at the Newberry Library where it, along with City on the Make by Nelson Algren, was one of the assigned texts. This book is a rumination on Preib's work as a Chicago cop, and primarily his work running the "wagon," the vehicle that is called to take dead bodies to the morgue. In Preib's writing he combines a practical account of the work of being a cop with his own emotional inner life, his relation to the city of his birth and his own unanswered questions about some of the choices he's made and places them in the larger context of our literary tradition. I think he perceives a greater need for ceremony and connection.
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