"In the Garden of Beasts"

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Erik Larson)

This book is the anti-Agent Zigzag; Where there I had no expectations and loved the book, here I heard this book getting praise up and down and, well. I guess my first clue should have been the fact that all of two weeks after the book came out my wife found a free copy sitting out on the curb. As it turns out, this book ended up in my own donation pile after blazing through it, and I feel bad for anyone who spent $10 on this thing. I don't get what all the hype was about, as I found this book to be boring, plodding, and - worst of all - pointless. If you have even a cursory knowledge of the subject matter, you already know everything in this book, and you've probably read it in a more entertaining form. Even if the material in this book is a surprise, the author's tedious framing device does it no favors - the American ambassador is, like almost everyone in the book, a flat character  and his daughter sleeping around seems completely disconnected from the rest of the book. Bizarrely, the book is about the ambassador, but only covers the brief period of time that is his tenure up through the Night of the Long Knives, then hits the fast-forward button on the long rest of his term before coming to a baffling ending. In short, stay away.

Grade: F