In the Garden of Beasts

For how gripping and fast-paced “Devil in the White City” was, this book was a struggle to get through. Such an interesting time in history - the rise of Hitler, Nazism, and the Third Reich - seen through an incredibly boring lens. I applaud Erik Larson for his ambition in writing this book - it is obviously exhaustingly researched, and the perspective is unique - but at the end it kind of fell flat for me.

The main reason for the book's failure is that he tried to base it too much on his protagonists - the American ambassador in Germany in the early 1930's, and his daughter. He did this, presumably, because he had a ton of source material from them - they both kept a journal, and in addition he had the ambassador's personal and government communication. We learn almost nothing about the ambassador's wife or son, since they did not keep detailed records of their time in Germany.

Both the ambassador and his daughter are weak characters. He's just not that interesting - a “quiet scholar” type, ridiculed within the foreign service establishment, and she is quite naive, interested in mostly keeping up romantic liasons in the city. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to detailing these romantic exploits, which gets tedious to read after a while. Yes - she was involved with prominent political and government figures, but these sections of the book read like a childish diary. Also, the combination of writing about both at the same time doesn't make too much sense - at times it felt like I was reading two different novels. (But this is a tactic Larson likes to use, as you would know if you read “Devil in the White City”).

The tedium of reading this book was also due to the overabundance of minor characters mentioned as part of the story. Couldn't Larson have edited some of these people out? Surely it doesn't make sense to mention - every - single - person - the family came in contact with.

There were parts of the book that were very interesting, and it was definitely a perspective on Nazi Germany that I had never encountered, but ultimately the book was crushed by its own weight.