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.