In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in Hitler’s Berlin Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2011) recounts the experiences of William E. Dodd, America’s new ambassador to Germany, and his 24-year-old daughter Martha living in Berlin near the Tiergarten (the huge park whose name means the Garden of Beasts), especially during their first year beginning in June 1933. In his prologue, Larson explains that he tried writing a “more intimate” book than “another grand history of that age” like, I suppose, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). Larson wanted “to reveal that past world through the experience and perceptions of my two primary subjects, father and daughter, who upon arrival in Berlin embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and, ultimately, deepest heartbreak.” Larson, then, depicts how the scholar, Jeffersonian democratic farmer, and “accidental diplomat” Dodd and his free-spirited and free-loving daughter were “two innocents. . . complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.” It’s fascinating to read Dodd’s initial attempts to remain objective and neutral, hoping to influence the German regime in a more civilized direction by steadfastly representing American values to them, as well as Martha’s initial infatuation with the Nazi revolution and the seemingly handsome, healthy, and happy Germans she saw everywhere. The major movement of Larson’s book then demonstrates how their first year in Berlin dramatically changed the optimistic views of father and daughter as the beasts in the garden (the Tiergarten park near their rented home serving as a metaphor for Berlin and Germany) began revealing their irrational, ruthless, arrogant, and malevolent natures. People familiar with that period of German and world history will be familiar with historical highlights like the Reichstag arson trial, the referendum on withdrawing from the League of Nations, the Night of the Long Knives, and the series of laws curtailing Jewish civil and human rights. I had not known about the many attacks on American citizens who made the mistake of not performing the Nazi salute when storm troopers paraded by. But the most interesting things I learned from Larson’s book concern the personality and role in events of Dodd and his daughter Martha. She was a passionate, independent, naïve, poetic, and romantic woman (engaging in affairs with American writers, French diplomats, Russian spies, Gestapo chiefs, and the like). It was fascinating to read about things like the Dodd family’s increasing and well-founded paranoia that their home phones were bugged, that their servants couldn’t be trusted, and that they were living in an insane country, so that even though they didn’t fear for their physical safety (not even the Nazis would dare to harm the American ambassador or his family), they lived in an intense state of tension making it difficult to converse or sleep. For Dodd this was exacerbated by his realization that members of his own staff were spying on him for his American State Department enemies, members of the “Pretty Good Club” of elite Ivy League millionaires for whom the foreign service and state department was a private boys’ club critical of Dodd’s attempts to rein in expenses and luxuries and of his failures to be sufficiently pro-German and anti-Jewish. The best part of this book, then, are the intimate details narrated through the letters and diaries and memoirs and so on of the Dodds that tell a true, appalling, and moving story. Larson writes plenty of witty and neat lines of his own, like, “That tincture of guilt only parents know how to add.” But perhaps he tries too hard to make his book as page-turningly suspenseful as a novel via a bit too much dramatic foreshadowing, the payoffs of which are often not so potent, as when he says, “In light of what was to happen a few years hence, Dodd’s crowing about his own driving prowess can only raise a chill,” or “Up until now she had only seen her father with tears in his eyes once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few more years time.” And there is an odd moment when Larson sympathizes with Dodd’s attempt to escape the insanity and stress of Berlin by working on his never-finished life work, a definitive and comprehensive multi-volume history of the American south: “Late that afternoon he devoted to quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.” I wonder if the slaves would’ve found it a more chivalrous age... The audiobook reader Stephen Hoye is professional and capable. People interested in WWII history focusing on Nazi Germany written from an unusual and personal point of view, that of the innocents abroad William and Martha Dodd, should like this book. View all my reviews
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The Changeling by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “when fairytales were meant for adults” “This fairytale begins in 1968 during a garbage strike.” The first sentence of Victor Lavelle’s The Changeling (2017) introduces his approach to the urban fantastic: mix the everyday minutiae of city life with the (cracked) magical. He writes many details of every day life in NYC, including subway trains, street names, parks, the arches of the Manhattan Bridge and Washington Square, the Buddhist temple in Chinatown, and the Fort Washington branch of the public library, as well as many other vivid details about things like making a Crockpot chicken dish, preparing a pot of tea, digging up a grave in a modern cemetery, selecting books at an estate sale, assembling a home computer system, watching TV shows like Home Improvement, posting baby photos on Facebook, and so on. Behind that detailed surface of real NYC life, Lavelle writes a magical world of wishes, witches, trolls, and changelings. His fusion of the mundane and the magical extends to metaphors and similes, many of which either make the everyday fantastic, as when a tea kettle screams like a tiny dragon or a lighted bus at dawn “might as well be a chariot pulling the sun across the sky,” or make the fantastic everyday, as when a coughing troll sounds like a car engine that won’t turn over. The novel depicts the painful growth of Apollo Kagwa (named for Rocky’s foe-friend) towards understanding the “glamour” that hides inconvenient parts of real life like the suffering of the weak and towards learning the truth behind his father’s apparent abandonment of his mother and him when he was an infant and behind changelings and parenting. His discovery of the magical reality lying beneath the everyday world gives Apollo “an overdose of the improbable” best dealt with by acceptance (to believe only the practical, rational, and the realistic is itself a kind of glamour) and love (between parent and child, sibling and sibling, friend and friend, husband and wife, etc.). In that context, Lavelle interestingly explores the nature, meaning, and value of fairy tales, referring as a touchstone to Maurice Sendak’s Oustide Over There, doing plenty with the fact that fairy tales were originally for adults, explaining an interesting message of Rapunzel (it’s difficult to protect children from the outside world), and exposing the dishonesty of “they lived happily ever after” endings. (I wish Lavelle had done more or less with Outside Over There than he does, for he has Apollo find and re-read or remember multiple copies of it, but only deals with Sendak’s story up to Ida’s discovery that an ice changeling has replaced her baby sister.) Lavelle’s book is also very much about race, including the trepidation with which black people (especially men) view white policemen and the suspicion with which they are viewed by shop owners and anonymous concerned citizens. There are some scenes of Walking, Doing Business, Catching a Taxi, and Talking in a Park While Black, all handled with pain, restraint, and humor (as when Apollo’s best friend Patrice is antsy about being out with him at night in a white neighborhood, not wanting to have survived a tour of duty in Iraq only to end up shot at home by a nervous policeman). Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird plays a key role in Lavelle’s novel, but Apollo knows that the sequel, in which “Atticus Finch is all racist and crabby,” reveals that “Ms. Lee knew the deal,” such that the later novel is “too honest” to be popular. His book does a lot with gender, too, appropriately gendering its monsters and victims. At one point Apollo’s mother Lillian explains things from a female point of view: “I tried to be nice about saying no to Charles, but some men, you can’t be polite to them. If you’re polite they think it means you’re undecided. They hear your tone and ignore your words.” Like the race themes, Lavelle also handles the gender themes with humor, as in his riffs on “New Dads,” contemporary men who earnestly participate in bringing up their kids: “New Dads didn’t know how to do serious home repair, but they could pay for it.” Even as it is a painful, horrifying, and moving novel, then, it is also a funny one. Lavelle has a winning dry humor, as when Apollo’s friend Patrice makes a big show of covering up his password entering device on his fancy computer system, and his wife Dana says that she knows all his passwords, because she checks his phone where he keeps them. Throughout, Lavelle writes witty lines, like “Maybe having a child was like being drunk. You couldn’t gauge when you went from being charming to being an asshole.” He also writes a lot of life wisdom, like “Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter,” and vivid descriptions, like “The sudden feeling of terror felt hot as sunlight against the back of his head.” He also capably reads his own novel. He doesn’t change his voice to become female or young or old characters, etc., but obviously knows exactly where to pause and when to intensify and reads clearly, and his voice and manner are appealing. I do think Lavelle unconvincingly leaves a few key questions and motivations unanswered and unexplained in the end, writes some almost too brutal and graphic violence, and divides his story into too many short chapters (a common feature of contemporary fiction). And the second half of his novel, when we’re sure that the fantastic is operating, is less compelling (to me) than the first half, when we’re among disturbing ambiguities. In its fusion of the everyday and the magical in a NYC setting, Lavelle’s novel reminds me of John Crowley's Little, Big, but with more horror and more consciousness about race and gender, and readers who like well-written urban fantasy with humor and horror and social relevance should like The Changeling. View all my reviews
Freddy and the Perilous Adventure by Walter R. Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Amusing Pro-Animal, Feminist Romp in and below the Blue Empyrean Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (1942), the 9th entry in Walter R. Brooks' 26-book Freddy the Pig series, is a fun book. It begins when Freddy, clever detective, natural poet, and pig of many disguises and interests, is tricked into going up in a hot air balloon by Mr. Golcher, a sour-faced, thin man of business who refers to himself as "Golcher" and cheats people out of money and then dares them to take him to court. Mr. Golcher tricks Freddy by asking him to make a patriotic speech at a 4th of July event to attract a bigger crowd and then revealing that the pig will (of course) also have to go up in the balloon. Not the bravest of pigs, Freddy reluctantly realizes he can't back out: "Oh dear, I wish I wasn't such a fearless character." There's nothing for it but for him to put on his "intrepid-pig-who-scoffs-at-peril" and his "pig-who-is-about-to-go-up-in-a-balloon-and-thinks-nothing-of-it" expressions and get in the balloon, which is, after all only to go straight up and come straight down after a brief ascension. Moreover, Freddy will be accompanied by the white duck sisters Emma and Alice, who'd like a little adventure, as well as by Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the Bean farm's spider couple, who'd like a new point of view. Nothing goes as planned. First, just before the pig is called on to make his speech, he chomps on a large piece of pulled candy made by the prisoners of the Centerboro jail, gluing his upper and lower teeth shut, so all he can say is, "Mmmmmmmmmmm," displeasing the crowd (isn't Freddy one of Mr. Bean's famous talking animals?). Second, a tangled valve cord prevents Freddy from bringing the balloon back to earth as scheduled, and when it's blown out of sight Mr. Gulcher accuses him of stealing the thing! The main plot relates the flight of the balloon and Freddy's attempts to avoid being arrested for theft and to clear his name. In this Freddy is aided by his animal and human friends in Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus and by Breckenridge, an eagle of high-flown diction ("Welcome, oh pig, to the starry upper spaces of the blue empyrean"), and hindered by the man with the black moustache and his dirty-faced son and by Mr. Gulcher, who wants Freddy's farmer friend and father-figure Mr. Bean to pay for the balloon and assorted "damages" and lost revenue caused by the pig. One of the best parts of this novel is its secondary plot concerning the relationship between Alice and Emma and their Uncle Wesley. The charlatan male chauvinist duck so tyrannized his admiring and retiring nieces that a few years ago some of the Bean animals secretly kidnapped him and got an eagle to dump him in the next county. The obedient sister ducks were so long under the sway of their uncle, who instilled in them the belief that they must be ladylike at all times, never going anywhere or doing anything fun and deferring to his judgment in all things, "that even after his mysterious disappearance and freedom from his tyranny they continued to quack his praises and to do as they thought he would approve." Their gradual growth away from the influence of Uncle Wesley begins when they decide to accompany Freddy in the balloon. At one point Mrs. Webb (the spider) tells her husband, "If you got all swelled up like Wesley, and started telling me everything I did was wrong, I'd just quietly drop you overboard some night when we were sailing along in the balloon." And later Rudy the squirrel gives Emma and Alice a revealing angle on their uncle: "I know his kind. Regular tyrant around the house with his women folks, but as meek as Moses out around town." When considering this novel and Freddy the Politician (1939), in which Mrs. Wiggins runs for president of the First Animal Republic after being told, "a cow's place is in the home," it becomes apparent that Brooks was a proto-feminist. Another thing I like about this book is its anti-cruelty to animals thrust. As in most of the other books in the series I've read, Brooks appropriately punishes or rewards people who abuse animals and people who are kind to them. The animals of Mr. Boomschmidt's circus are uncaged, help him run the circus, and help him teach a good lesson to a boy who's cruel to animals: "You know what it is like now to be helpless. I hope you'll remember it." Like the other Freddy books, this one is full of humor, from witty lines about animal and/or human behavior, like "That's a cat all over. Let him think you don't want him to do something, and he's crazy to do it," to comedic situations, like when Freddy tries to stand motionless in a field with his arms outstretched like a scarecrow to avoid drawing the attention of a couple of policemen, while a fly called Zero tries to make him sneeze. One disappointing thing in the novel is that only about 48 of its 244 pages consist of Freddy flying in the balloon, and apart from chapter 14, when he and Mr. Gulcher and some mice parachutists briefly go up in it, from Chapter 7 through Chapter 17 (the last one), Freddy is firmly on the earth, struggling to prove his innocence. The action in the air is exciting and impressive, as when the eagle Breckenridge joins the ballooning animals for some sandwiches, or as when Mr. Webb tells Freddy to stop worrying about being blown away and enjoy what must be "one of the finest views a pig ever set eyes on." By contrast, the action on the ground is often funny, but somewhat repetitive (Freddy wrestles Mr. Golcher twice and runs into some suspicious policemen twice). Finally, both children and adults should enjoy this book and get much nourishment from it, especially people who like witty and unpredictable talking animal stories with some thematic heft. It was the first Freddy book I read as a boy and holds up well after 45 years. View all my reviews
Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth.” When Harrison Harrison (H2 for short) was three, his father was lost at sea while saving the boy from a giant tentacled arm from the deep. Harrison’s leg had to be amputated and he nearly lost his life anyway, and ever since he’s had a phantom leg on steroids and a violent temper to match. Now he’s sixteen and his “rather Ahabish” Brazilian marine biologist mother Rosa has brought him with her to Dunnsmouth, Massachusetts, ostensibly to investigate whether the colossal squid makes it that far north. After their sunny San Diego home, Dunnsmouth is a Lovecraftian “heart of bleakness,” hermetic, inbred, and occult. Everyone looks related (black-haired, pale, fish-eyed, and creepy). People go missing all the time, perhaps victims of the legendary boogeyman called the Scrimshander. The bay resembles an alligator’s mouth. There is no cell-phone or Internet access (Harrison fears being “involuntarily Amished”). And his new school, Dunnsmouth Secondary (“Home of the Threshers”) consists of creepy teachers (who teach the making of fish net knots in Practical Skills, the galvanizing of dead frogs in Cryptobiology, the solving of nonsensical problems in Non-Euclidean Geometry, the reading of Catastrophes of New England 1650-1875 in English, and The Subjugation and Domination of Various People and Lands in World History), zombie-like students (who are as “quiet as pallbearers” and communicate to each other in “fingercant” invisible piano key tapping gestures), daily rituals called Voluntary in the assembly hall where everyone chants in an unknown language, and a permanently closed library where the librarian says things like, "The lure of the stacks can't be resisted." As if all that weren’t enough, after his first day at school, Harrison’s favorite book, his father’s 20th Anniversary Treasury Edition of the newspaper comic strip Newton and Leeb (about the adventures of a five-year-old boy genius and his robot dog) is stolen from the Harrisons’ rental house by a “Fish Boy,” a humanoid with webbed appendages, sharp teeth, and gills. And after Harrison’s second day at school, his mother goes missing while she’s out on a chartered lobster boat placing her radio buoys on the sea. The police say the boat, its pilot, and Rosa all disappeared without a trace, and that the Coast Guard has been called in to search for them. In addition to the compelling first-person narrator Harrison (with his expensive prosthetic leg and his sensitive phantom leg, his rational intelligence and his volcanic rage, his wit and his stubbornness), there are plenty of neat characters: Harrison’s aunt Selena (like a 2D model from a fashion magazine but clever, ironic, and caring), Lydia from school (as grim and difficult to cozy up to as Batman), Lubb (a male Little Mermaid type into comics and other landlubber popular culture), Salim (an ABD astrophysicist taxi driver), Professor Freytag (an eccentric ectoplasmic researcher), and Ruth and Isabelle (a mild girl and her bloodthirsty and apparently independently talking china doll). The reader Luke Daniels does a fine job reading the audiobook, crowding the camp line mostly without transgressing it (though his Lubb sounds a wee too much like Gollum). There’s lots of humor here, with the quirky characters and witty lines like “Cults. They always thought the glass was half-doomed.” There are some scares. Toad Mother is a 10’ tall and 10’ wide woman wearing a muumuu and smelling like an abattoir. The Scrimshander is a scary monster artist. Despite them and his mother’s awful plight, you’re never TOO worried about Harrison or his friends, perhaps because of the consistently funny tone. The concept of clever and rebellious youths opposed to wicked and none-too-bright adults must be appealing to the YA audience. Indeed, Harrison Squared (2015) reads like a cross between H. P. Lovecraft and Percy Jackson: The Lightening Thief, but it’s funnier and less disturbing than the former, and better written and less obnoxious than the latter. Although I found it less impressive than Daryl Gregory’s earlier novels Raising Stony Mayhall (excellent) and Afterparty (weird fun), I will probably read the next two entries in the trilogy when they are published. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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