"I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler's rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them?"

With his latest work of non-fiction, author Erik Larson takes us inside Berlin in the year 1933, to experience Hitler's rise to power from the point of view of two American protagonists. The first is William Dodd, a mild-mannered professor, who was practically President Roosevelt's last choice to serve as Ambassador to Hilter's Germany. The second is Dodd's 24 year-old daughter, Martha, who seeks to escape a dead marriage and experience an exciting city at the height of it's golden age.

The family settles into a mansion along the Tiergartenstrasse, an elegant district bordering a park lush with "trees and statuary." The literal meaning of the street is "Garden of Beasts", an apt name as the Dodds are soon to discover. As events unfold, Dodd, comically frugal and eager to extend American values in his new position, realizes the futility of his efforts, as the horrors of the Nazi regime become a reality he must live with. At the same time, the reader is called to sympathize with an Ambassador who is undermined and ridiculed by his own State Department.

As the Dodds hobnob with the Nazi elite, we find daughter Martha at first enamored with the new German state, and with several handsome men, with whom she has affairs. Her rose colored glasses gradually disappear as she witnesses the brutality and fear that continue to grow during that first year abroad.

Larson's journey into 193o's Berlin is exciting, gripping and full of intrigue. He gives an excellent overview of the politics affecting the decisions on both sides of the Atlantic. Not your stuffy history book, Erik Larson has you cheering for Dodd one moment and weeping for him (and the world) the next.

Thanks, Goodreads, for selecting me to receive an advance reader's edition of this book! To my fellow readers - In The Garden Of Beasts will be available to the public on May 10, 2011.