In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.  In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt named a new ambassador To Germany, William E. Dodd who was a professor of history at the University of Chicago.  This book covers his 4 years as ambassador during the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.  Ambassador Dodd brought his family with him—his wife and grown son and daughter.  The first year was a study in willful blindness to the growing evil of Nazism.  It is understandable only by remembering how strong the isolationist sentiment was at that time and how prevalent anti-Semitism was in the United States.  After the first year though the Dodd family’s eyes were open to the horrors.  Much of the time Dodd was at odds with the State Department which seemed more intent on recovering bonds from the German government than in facing Hitler.  The strain of living in Germany during those years caused a decline in Dodd’s health and he retired at the end of 1937.  After that, he spent much of his time and energy to alerting the citizens of the U.S. to the mounting danger from Germany.  The book included (maybe a bit too much) the various love affairs of his daughter Martha.  All in all, it presented a realistic picture of a family from Chicago suddenly plopped into the middle of the rising Third Reich where they had great cognitive dissonance between their expectations of a civilized society and their observation of a descent into barbarism.