I’ve read several of journalist and non-fiction writer Erik Larson’s books. I picked up the first of the two that I’ve read, Devil in the White City, because it’s about Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition and serial killers.

I think I also like Larson because he writes the kind of popular history that we were always warned against in my college history classes—it’s entertaining, therefore it’s evil!—which, of course, is a simplification of what my teachers said. Popular histories like these often skirt over serious research and lose tract of serious impetuses in favor of sensationalism. But I think it’s great whenever history books climb to the top of the charts. Okay, so maybe we don’t need to know about the World’s Columbian Exposition or H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. But Larson’s newest book, In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler's Berlin, takes an interesting look at anti-Semitism and American isolationism as serious factors in America's belated involvement in World War II.

In the Garden of the Beasts tells the story of William E. Dodd, a University of Chicago history professor who becomes the American ambassador in Germany, stationed in Berlin. The specifics of a history professor becoming ambassador to a place that needed only the utmost aplomb and diplomacy are still shaky, but needless to say, Dodd’s name was pretty far down the list. Dodd brought his wife Mattie and his two older children to accompany to him during his post.

Larson’s work focuses on the American angle of pre-World War II, when Hitler’s government was just ascending to power. Americans, even the Dodd family, were fairly anti-Semitic at this point and didn’t want to hear about the atrocities—beatings, work bans, etc…--that were already being perpetrated against the Jews. They didn’t even want to hear about Americans, some expatriates and some vacationers, being beaten or harassed by Hitler’s forces. Instead, they retained an isolationist perspective—that Americans should take care of their own, limit immigration quotas and keep out of foreign affairs.

Larson himself has an interesting history. He wrote for The Wall Street Journal and Time before he started writing books that weren’t explicitly historical. His first historical book was called Isaac’s Storm about the Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900. He followed that with the Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck, a book about the invention of the radio and the murderer-physician that this invention came to convict.

Larson is well aware of his professional historian critics. In an interview with Identitytheory.com, Larson’s says that professional historians leave the small stories behind in the footnotes, literally, while he, as a journalist who blends fiction and non-fiction in his books, focuses on these smaller ideas. He says that these type of stories—small ones about the invention of crackerjacks or what Dodd served Goebbels for dinner—are the stories that make popular histories more interesting than the big picture, turning point histories that students are assigned in high school and college.