{"id":1424,"date":"2013-06-17T09:38:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T15:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2015-05-31T12:19:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T18:19:43","slug":"in-the-garden-of-beasts-love-terror-and-an-american-family-in-hitlers-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1424","title":{"rendered":"In the Garden of Beasts, Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Erik Larson, 2011, Broadway Paperbacks, New York<\/p>\n

This is a fascinating book, well-written and extremely well-researched.\u00c2\u00a0 I was amazed at how well the author could reconstruct events that occurred so many years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t help compare his work to The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan<\/em> which I had recently read.\u00c2\u00a0 In that book the author apparently had the opportunity to interview many of the participants in that particular piece of history and did a poor job of bringing those insights to his book.\u00c2\u00a0 In the case of Larson’s book, he did not have an opportunity to interview many of the persons involved in his book because almost all of them are deceased.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, he did a much better job of relating the events that occurred.<\/p>\n

Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was that the author didn’t attempt to over-embellish the narrative.\u00c2\u00a0 He just describes the events and lets the reader react.\u00c2\u00a0 All too many times an author seems to try to pound home his or her particular views (e.g., Stacy Schiff in Cleopatra<\/em> and Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 I much prefer Larson’s style where he leaves it up to the reader to react and form opinions.<\/p>\n

It is chilling to read about this period of time in history when almost an entire population of a so-called civilized county was highjacked by a ill-educated megalomaniac and his henchmen.\u00c2\u00a0 In current times where there are very real dangers in our own country that require extra vigilance (i.e., surveillance) by our government of individuals’ actions, it behooves us to ensure that adequate processes and protections are in place to ensure that a similar result never occurs.
\n\"four<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Erik Larson, 2011, Broadway Paperbacks, New York This is a fascinating book, well-written and extremely well-researched.\u00c2\u00a0 I was amazed at how well the author could reconstruct events that occurred so many years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t help compare his work …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[20,16,21],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-history","tag-non-fiction","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1754,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}