Genre: Nonfiction—History
Completed: 3 August 2016
Summary & Review:
Historian and college professor William Dodd was chosen as ambassador to Germany in 1933 just as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were rising to power. An unlikely pick for an ambassador, the bookish Dodd stepped on many toes, both at home in the United States and in interwar Germany. Accompanying him was his wife and two twenty-something children, and together they witnessed as Hitler and the Nazis consolidated power and terrorized the German people.
This book was recommended to me by a friend and I was eager to read it. The subject matter is definitely something that interests me, but Larson took a rather strange approach to it. Rather than really delving into the details behind the Nazis rise and what it was truly like to live there during those early years of Hitler’s rule, he spent almost a third of the book discussing Dodd’s daughter Martha and her extensive love life. Not only did Martha have numerous affairs with married men including the head of the Gestapo, but she ended up spying for the Soviets against the United States and died in exile in Prague behind the Iron Curtain. Larson quoted Martha as saying how horrible the Nazis were but she completely embraced Soviet Communism which was responsible for millions more deaths than Nazism. Larson even had the gall to write, regarding Martha, “She died in 1990 at the age of eighty-two, not precisely a hero…”. Not precisely a hero?!? Not even close. In what world would she ever be considered a hero?
Anyway, I thought Larson’s pace was slow and his choice of emphasis puzzling so I doubt I’ll read any of his other works, despite them being best sellers.
Rating: 3.5
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