Larson's 'In the Garden of Beasts' explores Hitler's Berlin

By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

On the surface, best-selling writer Erik Larson does something silly in his compelling new non-fiction book In the Garden of the Beast. He describes Germany in the 1930s, as Hitler was consolidating power, from the perspective of Martha Dodd, a pretty young writer with an active love life.

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Think Carrie Bradshaw in Berlin.

Yet rather than trivializing the subject, this decision makes Garden the kind of book that brings history alive to readers and proves why Larson's Isaac's Storm and The Devil in the White City were such hits.

The politically naive but sexually adventurous Martha was the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, William Dodd. He was an unexpected diplomatic choice for FDR in 1933. A University of Chicago history professor who had lived in Germany, Dodd would later be considered the "Cassandra of American Diplomats" because of his accurate predictions about Hitler.

Unlike her father, Martha at 24 was dazzled at first by the Nazis, the sense of national purpose, the glamour of Berlin and the thrill of meeting Hitler in person. An assistant literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, she left her job to accompany her parents to Germany. (She also left her first husband behind.)

Like Pamela Harriman in wartime London, she attracted powerful men. Her admirers included German princes, French diplomats and Rudolf Diels, once head of the Gestapo who would later be imprisoned by Hitler and testify for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. And then there was Boris Winogradov, the man Martha considered one of her three great loves (a competitive category). A magnetic Russian who worked for the future KGB, he fell in love with the American ambassador's daughter while trying to recruit her as a Soviet agent.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
By Erik Larson
Crown, 464 pp., $26

The entertaining drama of Martha's personal life contrasts what what she witnessed before the family returned to the USA in 1937. Through this appealing but ordinary woman, we see the paranoia, hear the fevered rhetoric and witness attacks on Berlin's Jews.

Most of all, Larson captures how Martha, most Germans and the rest of world couldn't believe what was happening until it was too late.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

By Erik Larson

Crown, 464 pp., $26

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