While Erik Larson is a favorite author of mine and I have read or at least plan to read all of his nonfiction books, I feel like this one is not particularly his strongest. At its core, it's a dark and challenging read about the rise of Nazism in Germany seen through the eyes of an American diplomat, and a lesson in how fascism and hatred can slowly creep into a country or regime and then become suffocating without the proper attempts to strangle it. I feel that the sections of the book that attempt to warn against doing nothing in the face of creeping fascism (at least in my mind) do their job and do it well. As any book on Nazi Germany likely would be, it becomes at points both viscerally uncomfortable and yet impossible to look away from, especially as the main characters themselves begin to realize that they've been thrown into the whirlwind of a violent regime that is impossible to reason with.

However, I do think the narrative gets bogged down by unnecessary details in quite a few places. I don't think Larson truly needed to go into as much detail as he did about Martha and her romantic sojourns, nor did we need to spend so much time on the feud between Dodd and other government officials. I would have liked there to be more focus on Dodd as a whole, or on the German officials that he surrounded himself with in his days as an ambassador, which would have made the overall narrative feel much more fleshed out.

Overall, though, still an enlightening and uncomfortable read that serves to get its messages across. Vastly prefer Dead Wake and Devil in the White City out of his works.

If you’re concerned about democracy and curious about comparisons to 1930s Germany, this worthwhile read follows America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany and his family’s response—particularly his daughter, whose dalliances included the Gestapo chief and a Soviet spy—to the rise of Hitler. The result is a revealing, disturbing, and relevant depiction of moral complicity and political complexity and a dire warning about unexamined biases and underestimating evil.

This is the second of Erik Larson's books that I've read, and I found this one to be more engaging by a wide margin throughout the duration of the book. It was incredibly disconcerting to hear about the rampant anti-Semitism of America in the 1930s to 1940s. To hear about a person who is theoretically friends with multiple Jewish individuals, working to stop the atrocities against Jews in Hitler's Germany, and representing the United States in a volatile political sphere lament that he had too many Jews on his staff, and how he wished there were less despite most of them being his best employees. I never quite understand antisemitism, and I remain confused by the doublethink needed to maintain the opinions that these people in positions of power had. For Jewish people of prominence in Berlin being willing to maintain acquaintances, and to some extent, friendships with Nazi sympathizers, people who are friends with Nazis, and straight up Nazis was deeply disconcerting, but also somewhat understandable considering the political climate of the time and the deep desire to fit into avoid violent backlash. The mock trial that took place in New York was really interesting to read about, as were the physical and emotional descriptions of Hitler. He exists as a figurehead in our current comprehension of historical events, and through that lens I forgot how small Germany and the Nazi party is when compared to the US and the size of the US government which I am used to. Overall, this book made me uncomfortable but I am glad that I read it. To hear about the optimism visitors and Germans had for the third Reich and to see how people just brushed incidents of assault and murder under the rug in order to keep the Rose colored view of the world has exacerbated my fears for the future and for the possibility of history repeating itself.
Overall, this was really well written and Larson integrated quotes from primary sources into the narrative artfully. The narrative he wove using the variety of primary source documents he used made the story very engaging despite my discomfort at the subject matter.