In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

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Erik Larson

Crown, New York, 2011, English

Nonfiction, General

ISBN: 9780307408846

The author of The Devil in the White City recounts the true story of an American father and daughter living in Nazi Berlin during the first year of Hitler’s reign.

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James Biber

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Hindsight has a way of creating an amnesia about what you once didn't know. The view of the worst genocidal maniac and his psychopathic Reich, all documented by verbatim dialogue (mostly from private contemporary written accounts), is an exercise in the famous “boiling frog” theorem. It was, at nearly every point, inconceivable that Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess (and dozens of other less well-known and more complex figures) along with the entire nation could be led to the end we now know. This account is a remarkable and excruciating—and instructive.

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