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In The Garden of Beasts:Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

This solidly researched account of Germany and the U.S. before World War II reads like a novel full of intigue, love affairs, disloyalty, honor, dishonor, evil, and power. Erik Larson tells the story from the unique perspective of the American ambassador from 1933-1938, William Dodd, and his family. Dodd was a scholar who was looking for an ambassadorship simply because he wanted to finish his three-volume book on the Old South. He ended up in Berlin because nobody else wanted the job—a fact he didnt realize until he was committed to the position.

Dodd was a Jeffersonian Democrat who chose to live on a budget and walk to work instead of being chauffered about in a giant gas guzzler, as was the custom of ambassadors. He remained a misfit during his entire time in Germany because he was not one of the wealthy elites who normally fill such posts. Initially, he argued away the threat of Hitler and the Nazi party, but ultimately he tried to warn the Roosevelt administration of the reality of Hitler’s danger to Germany and to the world. He was deemed an alarmist by his “colleagues” in Washington, and his warnings were dismissed as the work of an academic unqualified for diplomatic work.

Larson demonstrates how America and the German people might have stopped the pure evil that descended on Germany, but they chose to leave it to others, thinking it would get better on its own. Worse, many Americans at the time excused Hitler’s most despicable acts, reasoning that Jews caused their own problems.

Larson researched hundreds of books, artices, and newsreels, but relied heavily on Dodd’s papers and on his and his daughter’s autobiographies. The daughter, Martha Dodd, was a notorious partier who had affairs with Germans, Russians, and anybody in between. She was blindsided by Nazi charm, until their crimes became too obvious for her to ignore. Her story is a juicy counterpoint to her father’s more staid approach.

Larson shows the complexities of the era, creating in Dodd a character who has the guts to publicly decry Nazi policy, but who remains somewhat naive about the political web he’s caught in. Likewise, Larson makes clear that, while many Germans remained complacent and complicit in Hitler’s evil, some even within the Nazi hierarchy tried to work against Hitler.

After Dodd was replaced as Ambassador, he toured the country, warning Americans of the true evil of Hitler’s regime. Even then, he was often seen as exaggerating.

—Pat Prijatel

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein

In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein began with a theme that resonated strongly with the liberal arts folks in our group. Our schooling was based on the traditional notion that diverse strands of a broad education strengthen each other. For some of us, that theme has been borne out by diverse and even checkered work histories. We were pleased to have Epstein explain why our bias may be valid.

Epstein begins by contrasting Tiger Woods’s early specialization in golf with Roger Federer’s dabbling in many sports until he settled rather late on tennis. Specialization and repetitive practice leads to positive results in what Epstein calls “kind” learning environments. In these environments, patterns repeat and feedback is usually rapid and accurate. Quick recognition and response is enhanced by practice. Examples he cites are flight crews and surgical teams. By contrast, “wicked” learning environments have a greater number of variables and are less predictable. These environments value more intuition and judgment, which are developed better through a broader range of experience.

Epstein dissects the learning process, showing that our learning skills have evolved to keep up with the shifting nature of the problems we deal with. Over generations, we have become better accustomed to abstract and conceptual problems, “wicked” learning environments, as shown by improved IQ test scores. He shows that slower learning may be deeper learning – with implications for both kind and wicked environments. He expands this thought through varied examples of musical and artistic development and unconventional career paths in other fields such as video game design, economic forecasting, and work team configurations.

He also shows how the accumulation of wider-ranging experiences can lead to changes in work directions and ultimately to better vocational “fit.” Military service academies provide a well-documented basis for this discussion. The early specialization of the academies does not lead to officers with longer service tenure, but rather produces mid-level officers ready to try other professional directions. Other recruiting sources bring people into the officer corps with more diversity of experience and whose later choice of this career path often leads to longer tenure. Epstein gives a related discussion of how “grit” adds or subtracts from performance. Persistence can be a virtue, but so can jumping to a new career track which other experiences now support. These “sampling” experiences also change problem-solving skills, with consequences in invention, incident management, and other areas.

Epstein’s writing is based on extensive review of scholarly work on learning and development, but presented in highly readable prose and laid out in engaging flow. His conclusions are more like realizations that emerge from a review of the academic research and historical examples he marshals to demonstrate the points. I never felt he was pushing me to agree, but simply showing me his way of view and inviting me along.

— Bill Smith

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, begins with famous actor Arthur Leander’s real-life death as he plays the role of King Lear on stage. At the same time, outside the theater, people are beginning to sicken and die of the Georgian flu as it sweeps the planet.

In the opening pages, the reader is tossed into a compelling post-apocalyptic world. Who will have the luck, grit, and skill to survive? How will they survive? How will they travel? Eat? Find shelter? Keep their sanity? Form communities? Move on?

The novel has an ensemble cast (a nod to The Traveling Symphony and the troupe of Shakespearian actors): Arthur, Clark, Miranda, Elizabeth, Tyler, Kirsten, and Jeevan—with Arthur as the connection among all the other characters. Clark is his best friend. Miranda is his first wife. Elizabeth is his second wife, mother of their young son, Tyler (who becomes the cruel, Calvinistically-bent Prophet). Kirsten is a child actress, cast as one of Lear’s young daughters. Jeevan is the person who rushes the stage in an effort to save Arthur.

Mandel pairs Kirsten and Tyler in a very Shakespearian way. They are both eight years-old when the flu wipes out almost everybody. Both are children of Arthur (he is Kirsten’s stage father). Both have copies of Miranda’s comic book, Dr. Eleven—which is a graphic expression of the pull between good and evil, awake and asleep, life and death, love and hate, beauty and ugliness that runs throughout the story.

As a grownup, as the Prophet, Tyler has become a cruel and terrifying cult leader in the name of God. Kirsten, on the other hand, before the company’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describes the world thus: “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away.”

Near the end of the novel, inevitably, Kirsten and the Prophet must face off.

To weave her tale, Mandel uses a rich and flexible narrative structure sort of like crochet, where there is a string of linear yarn, but the story is told in a series of interlocking loops that often go back to the beginning and start again—growing richer with each pass. She does playful, clever things to make connections. Lots of Shakespearian allusions; four different dogs named Loki; a paperweight which is a hostess gift to Miranda at a dinner party years before Arthur’s death, which Miranda gives back to Arthur, which he gives to his lover du jour, which she gives to Kirsten, which she gives to Clark for the Museum of Civilization. And everything, big and small, supports in some way awakening into a brave new world.

Jeevan, in the old world, was a paparazzi in a relationship with a shallow, indifferent woman. In the new world, twenty years out, he lives in a settlement in Virginia practicing primitive medicine. The end of the day finds him drinking wine amidst “the gentle music of the river, cicadas in the trees, the stars above the weeping willows on the far bank. . . . He was overcome at his good fortune at having found this place, this tranquility, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in.” Mandel shows us a new world which is a slow and painful work in progress. We get our parting look through the eyes of Clark who “has no expectation of seeing an airplane rise again in his lifetime, but is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?”

And the Traveling Symphony is going on the road again, taking a new route, perhaps to find the far southern town with the electrical grid. The first horse-drawn truck in the procession, as always, bears the creed: Because survival is insufficient.

— Sharelle Moranville