June 2025 Book, In the Garden of Beasts
Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Copies of the current month's selection are made available to patrons upon request. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson begins his nonfiction account of Berlin in 1933 when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person...