In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson is an excellent account of the lead-up to the so-called Night of the Long Knives when Hitler and Goering purged the Nazi ranks of all their opponents and enemies, June 30, 1934, with political assassinations numbering in the hundreds.  This from the point of view of the American ambassador William Dodd.  I always wondered what America was thinking by allowing Hitler to consolidate his power.  Now I know: it was exactly what the rest of Europe was thinking.  They viewed Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering as brutal adolescents, and were simply hoping against hope that the Nazi regime would collapse under the weight of their own paranoia, even as they saw it becoming stronger and stronger.  Ignored by the U.S. State Department, Dodd’s voice of warning was one crying in the wilderness, and only years later would his warnings prove correct.

The only problem I have with this book is having to endure the long passages about Dodd’s daughter Martha, her numerous affairs, her sexual exploits, her political naivete, and her pretensions of being a writer.  There hardly seemed any point in the long passages about her picnics with Soviet attache Boris Vinogradov and her various attempts to make him jealous with her many lovers.  The author could have noted her presence and her importance at key moments but otherwise have left her out of the main narrative.  I guess the author felt compelled to make her a main character in this story only because she wrote a memoir of that time, unlike Dodd’s wife and son who were also with him in Berlin.  The story and the way it’s told makes it  tailor-made for Hollywood, so we can expect to see the movie some time in 2014 starring Tom Hanks and Natalie Portman.