RaveThe Huffington PostAs Larson portrays him, Dodd was an academic and a ‘Jeffersonian liberal,’ a man of considerable integrity, who was clear-sighted in his understanding of Nazism and its goals, and prescient about its eventual militarist aggression … Casually anti-Semitic themselves, these men—in Larson’s thoroughly persuasive account—were more concerned with matters of wealth and social status than with Hitler’s increasingly repressive policies and actions. Their seemingly cavalier and laissez-faire attitudes allowed the Nazis to promulgate their hatred and advance their agenda virtually unrestrained by the international code of diplomatic norms … The terrible conclusion that we reach, in reading In the Garden of Beasts, is that, given vigilance, given honesty and integrity and sound judgment on the part of many, both within and outside Germany during those early years, Hitler could—and should—have been halted in his tracks.
Julian Barnes
PanThe Huffington PostI wanted to like the narrator more than I did. Looking back on events from the perspective of approaching age, he’s too often self-pitying and obtuse. … I was not much engaged, as others apparently were (the book was a NYT best seller) by the philosophical ramblings about time and the fragmentary nature of memory. I found little that was actually new and original in the treatment of a theme that has been with us, in modern literature, at least since Marcel Proust’s great masterpiece. I’m perhaps a little simple-minded about this, but it seemed to me that the book was rather more heavy on the ‘telling’ of the theme than on its ‘showing.’
