In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik LarsonMy 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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2 comments:
Ouch. It sounds like such a great story to tell. Too bad the author seems to have flubbed it. Maybe this was his first experience publishing heavy research, and he'll bring it up less in later books.
Did he actually talk about his research IN the book, or did he just repeat it in the foreword, author's note, afterword, etc.?
Actually, this is his SECOND book of heavy-research. His first one was "Devil in the White City," also a well-researched book but had shaky storylines with tenuous connects.
Admittedly, Larson doesn't explicitly talk about the research he did in the text (he'll say things like, "in an interview with so-and-so," which is a proper journalistic technique) but he would allude to the research. In reference to Martha Dodd's memoir and other information, he talked about how her journals were "unpublished" or were "hard-to-find journals," or "secret, unpublished papers," which just gets annoying after a while. I get it, her journals were unpublished and look at you, Mr. Researcher, you found them. Congratulations. Have a research medal or something.
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