In the Garden of Beasts

Professor William E. Dodd, FDR's fifth choice for the post of American ambassador to Germany in 1933, was na•ve and unsuited to the lavish diplomatic highlife. However, his flamboyant daughter, Martha, fit right in, growing infatuated with Berlin and Nazism. Stephen Hoye narrates Erik Larson's absorbing look at pre-WWII Germany, when Germany was crawling back from political and economic upheaval. Using journals, letters, and secondary and archival source material, Larson recounts the increasingly chaotic environment of diminishing civil rights, increasing anti-Semitism, violence, and brutality. Hoye's gripping performance chills to the soul. Dodd's warnings to Washington of Hitler's dark motives went unheeded partly because Washington feared that, if censured, Germany wouldn't pay its postwar debts. Hoye's edgy reading makes familiar events seem no less nightmarish. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine