("In the Garden of Beasts")

[fiefoe]

As an audiobook, Eric Larson's account of an American ambassador's year in Nazi Germany isn't as suspenseful as the book reviews seem to indicate. I lost interest around the time the author enumerated all the love affairs the ambassador's daughter carried on.

• “... but added that tincture of vinegar that only parents seem to know how to apply."
• Thornton Wilder was Martha Dodd's main correspondent.
• "... and the grass is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes."
• Himmler used to be a chicken farmer.
• Gropius's work could be seen in Berlin in the 1930s.
• Berlin also boasted a cafe that produced indoor thunderstorms at that time.
• Hitler himself acknowledged... that "we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness."
• What dueling scars look like:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diels