While I am usually an ardent fan of Erik Larson's nonfiction, this book is not my favorite. Not because the subject matter is not compelling, but because you know how the story will end. It's like reading about the Titanic -- fascinating, but ultimately disappointing. We follow newly minted Ambassador Dodd and his family (wife, grown daughter and grown son) to Berlin in 1933, where they take up residence and work in central Berlin (Tiergarten district, the English translation of which lends itself to the title). Dodd is a frustrated academic who would like nothing more than to live frugally within his means and finish his multi-volume magnum opus on the Old South. His wife and son are merely cardboard cutouts in the background, because daughter Martha takes front stage immediately. The best description of her comes from writer Thomas Wolfe, who said she was like a "butterfly hovering around [his] penis." Martha goes through men like kleenex and has a disturbing amount of sympathy and admiration for all her new Nazi friends, only tempered through directly observing the many acts of violence they perpetrate throughout the book. Ultimately, you will bite your nails at the growing volume of correspondence between Berlin and Washington that essentially reads: "Hey Roosevelt, these Nazis mean business and show no signs of stopping." Also shocking is the amount of (thinly) veiled anti-Semitism coming from America, where they feel that too many of "the Chosen People" are in positions of power. It's clear that if the world community really *wanted* to neuter Hitler early on, they certainly could have. There were plenty of signs and evidence that he was not going to be an adorable pussycat in the Garden of the Beasts. The tension of the book is compromised, however, by the fact that Dodd and his wife were not distracted nor overly concerned with Martha's liaisons. If she had affected Dodd's ability to correspond with Washington or leaked critical information to Nazi agents, then the plot would have really taken off. my read shelf: 