Critique du Publishers Weekly
Larson (Devil in the White City) delivers another spellbinding and lively history in this exploration of Adolf Hitler's rise to power as seen by U.S. Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd and his daughter, Martha. Larson contrasts Dodd's family life with the larger political and cultural shifts occurring in the years leading up to WWII. And he provides new insights into U.S. foreign policy via a close examination of Dodd's letters and writings. Stephen Hoye provides compelling narration and reads with a commanding voice that is deep but never intrusive. His narration is deliberate and forces listeners pay close attention to the author's prose. He also captures Martha's emotion and excitement as she falls in-and eventually out of-line with the Nazi Party and engages in several affairs. The narrator's tone and delivery match Larson's prose, never condemning Martha's actions, but simply presenting her view of the world. At times, Hoye's narration slows, but his emphasis, inflection, flawless pronunciation, and energy will keep listeners engaged until the very end. A Crown hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Booklist
*Starred Review* In 1933 William E. Dodd led a comfortable but not altogether satisfying existence as a history professor at the University of Chicago. What he longed for was a position that would pay well but also allow him time to complete his masterwork, a four-volume history of the Old South. After offering the position to several other candidates who declined, President Roosevelt selected Dodd, who had studied in Germany, to be ambassador there. Dodd pulled up stakes, bringing his wife, son, and daughter with him to Berlin. Hitler and his Nazi Party had recently gained control of the government, and they were relentlessly working to consolidate their power over the nation. Larson, best known for his acclaimed The Devil in the White City (2003), has written a brilliant and often infuriating account of the experiences and evolving attitudes of the Dodd family during Hitler's critical first year in power. Dodd is seen here as a decent but frustratingly naive figure who keeps obtusely expecting moderate Nazis to emerge, even as the outrages against Jews and even American citizens intensify. His 24-year-old daughter, Martha, is attractive, flirtatious, and initially entranced by the apparent dynamism and revolutionary spirit of the Nazis. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the Dodds seem almost criminally ignorant, but Larson treats them with a degree of compassion that elevates them to tragic status.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
WILLIAM E. DODD was an academic historian, living a quiet life in Chicago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him United States ambassador to Germany. It was 1933, Hitler had recently been appointed chancellor, the world was about to change. Had Dodd gone to Berlin by himself, his reports of events, his diary entries, his quarrels with the State Department, his conversations with Roosevelt would be source material for specialists. But the general reader is in luck on two counts: First, Dodd took his family to Berlin, including his young, beautiful and sexually adventurous daughter, Martha; second, the book that recounts this story, "In the Garden of Beasts," is by Erik Larson, the author of "The Devil in the White City." Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds' intimate witness to Hitler's ascendancy and created an edifying narrative of this historical byway that has all the pleasures of a political thriller: innocents abroad, the gathering storm. When the Dodds arrived in Germany in July 1933, storm troopers were beating American tourists bloody on the streets. Jews (1 percent of Germany's population) were targets of brutal violence and ever tightening social restrictions. Martha Dodd found life in Berlin entirely charming. Many men courted her and found her eagerly responsive. She was enthralled with the Nazi movement: "I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me," she wrote in her memoir. To a friend she said, "We sort of don't like the Jews anyway." In this last, at least, she echoed the general view at home. Public opinion was isolationist; the country would scarcely open its doors to German-Jewish refugees; the State Department was filled with anti-Semites, inclined to let Hitler have his way. American Jewish leaders were themselves divided on the best response to the crisis. As Roosevelt had instructed Dodd, Germany's treatment of Jews was shameful, but it was not the business of the American government. At first, Dodd was optimistic that Hitler's regime would change. But as the months passed, it became clear to him that a disaster was in process, that Hitler was bound for a war to dominate Europe. Dodd became a Cassandra: "What mistakes and blunders," he wrote, "and no democratic peoples do anything!" In her love affairs, Martha was ecumenical and prodigal: Rudolph Diels, for one, chief of the Gestapo; the writer Thomas Wolfe, when he came to town; a French diplomat; a German flying ace; and most important, Boris Winogradov, who was attached to the Soviet Embassy, and with whom she fell in love. Martha, now disillusioned with the Nazis, was recruited by the Soviet secret police. After almost five years in Germany, Dodd came home exhausted and ill. He continued to warn of the great danger ahead, but, as he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939, after Hitler's invasion of Poland, "Now it is too late." A few months later, he was dead. Winogradov disappeared in Stalin's purges, but Martha continued her connection with Soviet intelligence. When she returned to the United States, she became prominent in Communist causes but, apparently, was no longer useful as a agent. Nevertheless, in 1953, when Martha and her husband, Alfred Stern, were subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, they fled to Mexico, and from there to Prague, where Martha died in 1990 at the age of 82, disillusioned once again. The story of prewar Germany, of the Jews, of book burnings, of the Reichstag trial, of the Night of the Long Knives, of the Nuremberg rally, of the unfolding disaster is old news. But Larson has connected the dots to make a fresh picture of these terrible events. After Martha Dodd became disillusioned with the Nazis, she was recruited by the Soviet secret police. Dorothy Gallagher is writing a book about Lillian Hellman.
Critique de Kirkus
A sometimes improbable but nevertheless true tale of diplomacy and intrigue by bestselling author Larson (Thunderstruck, 2006, etc.).William E. Dodd, the unlikely hero of the piece, was a historian at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s, tenured and unhappy, increasingly convinced that he was cut out for greater things than proctoring exams. Franklin Roosevelt, then in his second year in office, was meanwhile having trouble filling the ambassadorship in Berlin, where the paramilitary forces of Hitler's newly installed regime were in the habit of beating up Americansand, it seems, American doctors in particular, one for the offense of not giving the Nazi salute when an SS parade passed by. Dodd was offered the job, and he accepted; as Larson writes, "Dodd wanted a sinecure...this despite his recognition that serving as a diplomat was not something to which his character was well suited." It truly was not, but Dodd did yeomanlike work, pressing for American interests while letting it be known that he did not think much of the blustering Naziseven as, the author writes, he seems to have been somewhat blind to the intensity of anti-Semitism and was casually anti-Semitic himself. More interesting than the scholarly Dodd, whom the Nazis thought of as a musty old man, was his daughter Martha, a beauty of readily apparent sexual appetite, eagerly courted by Nazis and communists alike. The intrigues in which she was caught up give Larson's tale, already suspenseful, the feel of a John le Carr novel. The only real demerit is that the book goes on a touch too long, though it gives a detailed portrait of a time when the Nazi regime was solidifying into the evil monolith that would go to war with the world only five years later.An excellent study, taking a tiny instant of modern history and giving it specific weight, depth and meaning.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
Simultaneous release with the Crown hc (125,000-copy first printing), which was an Editors' Spring Pick, LJ 2/15/11; Stephen Hoye reads. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Extraits
CHAPTER 1 Means of Escape The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago. Now chairman of the history department, Dodd had been a professor at the university since 1909, recognized nationally for his work on the American South and for a biography of Woodrow Wilson. He was sixty-four years old, trim, five feet eight inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and light brown hair. Though his face at rest tended to impart severity, he in fact had a sense of humor that was lively, dry, and easily ignited. He had a wife, Martha, known universally as Mattie, and two children, both in their twenties. His daughter, also named Martha, was twenty-four years old; his son, William Jr.--Bill--was twenty-eight. By all counts they were a happy family and a close one. Not rich by any means, but well off, despite the economic depression then gripping the nation. They lived in a large house at 5757 Blackstone Avenue in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, a few blocks from the university. Dodd also owned--and every summer tended--a small farm in Round Hill, Virginia, which, according to a county survey, had 386.6 acres, "more or less," and was where Dodd, a Jeffersonian democrat of the first stripe, felt most at home, moving among his twenty-one Guernsey heifers; his four geldings, Bill, Coley, Mandy, and Prince; his Farmall tractor; and his horse-drawn Syracuse plows. He made coffee in a Maxwell House can atop his old wood-burning stove. His wife was not as fond of the place and was more than happy to let him spend time there by himself while the rest of the family remained behind in Chicago. Dodd named the farm Stoneleigh, because of all the rocks strewn across its expanse, and spoke of it the way other men spoke of first loves. "The fruit is so beautiful, almost flawless, red and luscious, as we look at it, the trees still bending under the weight of their burden," he wrote one fine night during the apple harvest. "It all appeals to me." Though generally not given to cliche, Dodd described the telephone call as a "sudden surprise out of a clear sky." This was, however, something of an exaggeration. Over the preceding several months there had been talk among his friends that one day a call like this might come. It was the precise nature of the call that startled Dodd, and troubled him. For some time now, Dodd had been unhappy in his position at the university. Though he loved teaching history, he loved writing it more, and for years he had been working on what he expected would be the definitive recounting of early southern history, a four-volume series that he called The Rise and Fall of the Old South, but time and again he had found his progress stymied by the routine demands of his job. Only the first volume was near completion, and he was of an age when he feared he would be buried alongside the unfinished remainder. He had negotiated a reduced schedule with his department, but as is so often the case with such artificial ententes, it did not work in the manner he had hoped. Staff departures and financial pressures within the university associated with the Depression had left him working just as hard as ever, dealing with university officials, preparing lectures, and confronting the engulfing needs of graduate students. In a letter to the university's Department of Buildings and Grounds dated October 31, 1932, he pleaded for heat in his office on Sundays so he could have at least one day to devote to uninterrupted writing. To a friend he described his position as "embarrassing." Adding to his dissatisfaction was his belief that he should have been farther along in his career than he was. What had kept him from advancing at a faster clip, he complained to his wife, was the fact that he had not grown up in a life of privilege and instead had been compelled to work hard for all that he achieved, unlike others in his field who had advanced more quickly. And indeed, he had reached his position in life the hard way. Born on October 21, 1869, at his parents' home in the tiny hamlet of Clayton, North Carolina, Dodd entered the bottom stratum of white southern society, which still adhered to the class conventions of the antebellum era. His father, John D. Dodd, was a barely literate subsistence farmer; his mother, Evelyn Creech, was descended from a more exalted strain of North Carolina stock and deemed to have married down. The couple raised cotton on land given to them by Evelyn's father and barely made a living. In the years after the Civil War, as cotton production soared and prices sank, the family fell steadily into debt to the town's general store, owned by a relative of Evelyn's who was one of Clayton's three men of privilege--"hard men," Dodd called them: ". . . traders and aristocratic masters of their dependents!" Dodd was one of seven children and spent his youth working the family's land. Although he saw the work as honorable, he did not wish to spend the rest of his life farming and recognized that the only way a man of his lowly background could avoid this fate was by gaining an education. He fought his way upward, at times focusing so closely on his studies that other students dubbed him "Monk Dodd." In February 1891 he entered Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Virginia Tech). There too he was a sober, focused presence. Other students indulged in such pranks as painting the college president's cow and staging fake duels so as to convince freshmen that they had killed their adversaries. Dodd only studied. He got his bachelor's degree in 1895 and his master's in 1897, when he was twenty-six years old. At the encouragement of a revered faculty member, and with a loan from a kindly great-uncle, Dodd in June 1897 set off for Germany and the University of Leipzig to begin studies toward a doctorate. He brought his bicycle. He chose to focus his dissertation on Thomas Jefferson, despite the obvious difficulty of acquiring eighteenth-century American documents in Germany. Dodd did his necessary classwork and found archives of relevant materials in London and Berlin. He also did a lot of traveling, often on his bicycle, and time after time was struck by the atmosphere of militarism that pervaded Germany. At one point one of his favorite professors led a discussion on the question "How helpless would the United States be if invaded by a great German army?" All this Prussian bellicosity made Dodd uneasy. He wrote, "There was too much war spirit everywhere." Dodd returned to North Carolina in late autumn 1899 and after months of search at last got an instructor's position at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He also renewed a friendship with a young woman named Martha Johns, the daughter of a well-off landowner who lived near Dodd's hometown. The friendship blossomed into romance and on Christmas Eve 1901, they married. At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South "was altogether right in seceding from the Union." The backlash was immediate. An attorney prominent in the veterans' movement launched a drive to have Dodd fired from Randolph-Macon. The school gave Dodd its full support. A year later he attacked the veterans again, this time in a speech before the American Historical Society in which he decried their efforts to "put out of the schools any and all books which do not come up to their standard of local patriotism." He railed that "to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man." Dodd's stature as a historian grew, and so too did his family. His son was born in 1905, his daughter in 1908. Recognizing that an increase in salary would come in handy and that pressure from his southern foes was unlikely to abate, Dodd put his name in the running for an opening at the University of Chicago. He got the job, and in the frigid January of 1909, when he was thirty-nine years old, he and his family made their way to Chicago, where he would remain for the next quarter century. In October 1912, feeling the pull of his heritage and a need to establish his own credibility as a true Jeffersonian democrat, he bought his farm. The grueling work that had so worn on him during his boyhood now became for him both a soul-saving diversion and a romantic harking back to America's past. Dodd also discovered in himself an abiding interest in the political life, triggered in earnest when in August 1916 he found himself in the Oval Office of the White House for a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. The encounter, according to one biographer, "profoundly altered his life." Dodd had grown deeply uneasy about signs that America was sliding toward intervention in the Great War then being fought in Europe. His experience in Leipzig had left him no doubt that Germany alone was responsible for starting the war, in satisfaction of the yearnings of Germany's industrialists and aristocrats, the Junkers, whom he likened to the southern aristocracy before the Civil War. Now he saw the emergence of a similar hubris on the part of America's own industrial and military elites. When an army general tried to include the University of Chicago in a national campaign to ready the nation for war, Dodd bridled and took his complaint directly to the commander in chief. Dodd wanted only ten minutes of Wilson's time but got far more and found himself as thoroughly charmed as if he'd been the recipient of a potion in a fairy tale. He came to believe that Wilson was correct in advocating U.S. intervention in the war. For Dodd, Wilson became the modern embodiment of Jefferson. Over the next seven years, he and Wilson became friends; Dodd wrote Wilson's biography. Upon Wilson's death on February 3, 1924, Dodd fell into deep mourning. At length he came to see Franklin Roosevelt as Wilson's equal and threw himself behind Roosevelt's 1932 campaign, speaking and writing on his behalf whenever an opportunity arose. If he had hopes of becoming a member of Roosevelt's inner circle, however, Dodd soon found himself disappointed, consigned to the increasingly dissatisfying duties of an academic chair. Now he was sixty-four years old, and the way he would leave his mark on the world would be with his history of the old South, which also happened to be the one thing that every force in the universe seemed aligned to defeat, including the university's policy of not heating buildings on Sundays. More and more he considered leaving the university for some position that would allow him time to write, "before it is too late." The idea occurred to him that an ideal job might be an undemanding post within the State Department, perhaps as an ambassador in Brussels or The Hague. He believed that he was sufficiently prominent to be considered for such a position, though he tended to see himself as far more influential in national affairs than in fact he was. He had written often to advise Roosevelt on economic and political matters, both before and immediately after Roosevelt's victory. It surely galled Dodd that soon after the election he received from the White House a form letter stating that while the president wanted every letter to his office answered promptly, he could not himself reply to all of them in a timely manner and thus had asked his secretary to do so in his stead. Dodd did, however, have several good friends who were close to Roosevelt, including the new secretary of commerce, Daniel Roper. Dodd's son and daughter were to Roper like nephew and niece, sufficiently close that Dodd had no compunction about dispatching his son as intermediary to ask Roper whether the new administration might see fit to appoint Dodd as minister to Belgium or the Netherlands. "These are posts where the government must have somebody, yet the work is not heavy," Dodd told his son. He confided that he was motivated mainly by his need to complete his Old South. "I am not desirous of any appointment from Roosevelt but I am very anxious not to be defeated in a life-long purpose." In short, Dodd wanted a sinecure, a job that was not too demanding yet that would provide stature and a living wage and, most important, leave him plenty of time to write--this despite his recognition that serving as a diplomat was not something to which his character was well suited. "As to high diplomacy (London, Paris, Berlin) I am not the kind," he wrote to his wife early in 1933. "I am distressed that this is so on your account. I simply am not the sly, two-faced type so necessary to 'lie abroad for the country.' If I were, I might go to Berlin and bend the knee to Hitler--and relearn German." But, he added, "why waste time writing about such a subject? Who would care to live in Berlin the next four years?" Whether because of his son's conversation with Roper or the play of other forces, Dodd's name soon was in the wind. On March 15, 1933, during a sojourn at his Virginia farm, he went to Washington to meet with Roosevelt's new secretary of state, Cordell Hull, whom he had met on a number of previous occasions. Hull was tall and silver haired, with a cleft chin and strong jaw. Outwardly, he seemed the physical embodiment of all that a secretary of state should be, but those who knew him better understood that when angered he had a most unstatesmanlike penchant for releasing torrents of profanity and that he suffered a speech impediment that turned his r's to w's in the manner of the cartoon character Elmer Fudd--a trait that Roosevelt now and then made fun of privately, as when he once spoke of Hull's "twade tweaties." Hull, as usual, had four or five red pencils in his shirt pocket, his favored tools of state. He raised the possibility of Dodd receiving an appointment to Holland or Belgium, exactly what Dodd had hoped for. But now, suddenly forced to imagine the day-to-day reality of what such a life would entail, Dodd balked. "After considerable study of the situation," he wrote in his little pocket diary, "I told Hull I could not take such a position." But his name remained in circulation. And now, on that Thursday in June, his telephone began to ring. As he held the receiver to his ear, he heard a voice he recognized immediately. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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