In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and the Research this guy did about Hitler's Berlin

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

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I am wary of authors who constantly tell their audience how much research they did for their work. Authors who do that make me suspicious, and thus when I am reading through their books I disturst their authority. If they need to reassure me that, yes, this thing is true, he knows it, he researched it, then something is wrong. If the author was truly confident in the legitimacy of his work, there would be no need for all of this bombardment.

In "In the Garden of Beasts," Erik Larson is more enamored with how much research he, himself, the author, the big-man-in-the-library, did for this work rather than in telling the actual story. There's no doubt he did a lot of research--he tells you enough times--which is, on its own, quite admirable. But I would rather read the story and then flip to the back, only then discovering the vast amount of citations and sources that backs the work.

Larson, on the other hand, uses his research as the only interesting part of his authorship. His end note, "Among Monsters," talks about how difficult it was for his state of mind to do all of that darned research on that vile man we all love to hate, Hitler. I have no sympathy for Larson, because no one held a gun to his head and told him to stare at the cover of "Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris," by Ian Kershaw. We all know how horrific the Holocaust was. We all know how terrible Hitler was. You are not special in your feelings, Larson.

This all struck me before I noticed Larson's static prose, and boring rendering of Dodd and his daughter Martha. The subtitle is a lie, since the book is not about the Dodd family at all, with the mother and son effectively disappearing after they are introduced, until their deaths at the end. I felt no connection to these characters, and found the book itself to be more of a list of parties they attended, sad letters they wrote and things they whined about. Which is why the end baffled me.

Larson heralds Dodd as "a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness." (Pg 356) Wait... what? Throughout his diplomacy Dodd is characterized more as a bumbling academic, anti-semitic and incredibly sulky. As a character who comes back to America to give speeches about the horror of the early Nazi regime, he has the possibility to become a fairly deep and complex character, if only Larson had taken that opportunity and ran with it. Instead, there is no life in any of the characters. There is barely any life to this book at all.

The book should have ended with the massacre in 1934. Larson spends so much time wallowing in 1933 that the episode in 1934 is essentially the end of the story. He then speeds through the last 3 years of Dodd's ambassadorship so suddenly that for the last 70 or so pages I didn't know at what point in time the events were happening. It was almost as if Larson either had tired of the subject (like how I felt at the end) or had rushed to meet some sort of deadline. Whichever was the case, the book is a dud. I begrudgingly gave it that second star on account of all that research that Larson reassures us he most decidedly did do.


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From the Desk of an Intern: The Life of Trees

The fourth week of my internship was a short one. I was entertaining a visiting friend and little could be done until I visited the Library of Congress to undergo training for organizing the files for the American Scholar. Like the week before, I perused old issues of the Scholar. This time, however, I also went through old tear-sheets--unbound books, essentially--and got rid of any unnecessary copies. The amount of paper I went through was astounding.

Many organizations, even if they don't directly deal with books and other literary works, probably use an exorbitant amount of paper. Technophiles and environmentalists alike may use this as an argument for the digitalization of everything. I am not sure if I truly agree with this, but what I do know was how wonderful it was to sift through water-stained copies of the Scholar from 1960. I loved seeing the handwritten notes of editors-past on old tear-sheets. Even the difference in paper quality from 1990 to 2006 was amazing to me.

Maybe it does kill trees, but it keeps the heart of progress alive.

From the Desk of an Intern: Publishing Through the Ages

It's been said the publishing world is a dying industry. With the rise of the Internet, free-flowing information and the younger generation's ineptitude of the concept of plagiarism, it's no wonder.

Or is it?

I have no doubt the publishing industry is changing, but I do not think it is dying. Rather, it is more evolving than anything else. Maybe publishing is pushing its way from a sea of tear-sheets and reams of paper onto the malleable dirt of the Internet. Okay, may that's not the best metaphor, but the publishing industry has been in the process of evolution since day one.

This past week, June 13, I've been reading through the archives of the American Scholar as research for their new tumblr. Steve, the business manager suggested I go through and find the issues the "famous" authors, like Albert Einstein or Natalie Angier, wrote in. I ended up coming across Jacques Barzun first, a man I have never heard of before. His work was first published in the 40s and I found his work well into the 60s. He wrote on many topics, from political commentary to philosophy. And yet, his words, written over 50 years ago, are still able to ring true today.

It was then I found the Autumn 2001 issue in which a man named Andre Bernard compiled a chrestomathy of the best work from the 70 years the magazine has been in existence. At the bottom of all 8 pages is a list of all significant authors from each decade starting in the 30s, when the journal was first published. W. E. B. DuBois, Alduous Huxley, Ralph Ellison, even R. Buckminster Fuller... the list goes on.

What this says to me about the publishing industry is that there is always something to publish. In regards to the American Scholar, there is always someone striving to better oneself as well as humanity. Twitter and Facebook allow information to reach people instantaneously. Such a barrage of data loses any semblance of quality-control. A sparkling gem can be as easily access as a pile of ash... but much harder to find. Anyone can publish anything online these days. I think the publishing industry--the real publishing industry--will still exist as a sort of filter, a suggestion to those tired of wading through the muck. And even then, that filter will always depend on who holds the most money.

But there is something else to be said about humanity. Paul Shorey said in the first issue of the American Scholar, Winter 1932: "The man of educated sensibilities, whether conservative or radical, pays a big price for the blessing of democracy in widest commonalty spread." Maybe we are all paying a price for the blessing of the Internet.