A review by rosa_lina96
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

challenging dark informative reflective tense slow-paced

3.25

While Erik Larson is a favorite author of mine and I have read or at least plan to read all of his nonfiction books, I feel like this one is not particularly his strongest. At its core, it's a dark and challenging read about the rise of Nazism in Germany seen through the eyes of an American diplomat, and a lesson in how fascism and hatred can slowly creep into a country or regime and then become suffocating without the proper attempts to strangle it. I feel that the sections of the book that attempt to warn against doing nothing in the face of creeping fascism (at least in my mind) do their job and do it well. As any book on Nazi Germany likely would be, it becomes at points both viscerally uncomfortable and yet impossible to look away from, especially as the main characters themselves begin to realize that they've been thrown into the whirlwind of a violent regime that is impossible to reason with.

However, I do think the narrative gets bogged down by unnecessary details in quite a few places. I don't think Larson truly needed to go into as much detail as he did about Martha and her romantic sojourns, nor did we need to spend so much time on the feud between Dodd and other government officials. I would have liked there to be more focus on Dodd as a whole, or on the German officials that he surrounded himself with in his days as an ambassador, which would have made the overall narrative feel much more fleshed out.

Overall, though, still an enlightening and uncomfortable read that serves to get its messages across. Vastly prefer Dead Wake and Devil in the White City out of his works.
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