Back in the day, back when buying CDs was the best way to find music, before you could just go online and buy single songs and/or listen to a band's whole discography in order to decide if they were worth it or not, that "second hit" meant a lot. Yes, there were songs that you just liked so much, that you would buy the whole album with the risk that the track you loved would be the only track worth listening to. (A gamble that I have lost many times, my friend.) (Looking at you, Maroon 5) But there were the songs you liked, but you needed to hear a second song, just to make sure that the artist was consistently good enough to spend the money. Because if there were two different songs I liked, then statistically it was more likely that I would like most of the tracks that artist made. (Also a gamble I've been know to lose, but not nearly as often.) (Looking at you, Goo Goo Dolls) (Yeah, I have crap taste in music. Deal with it.)
Even though technology has pretty much wasted that method for my musical searches, I still abide by the same method for books. I tend to believe that a lot of authors can catch lightning in a bottle, and write one good book, and I've read plenty of "second" books by an author who has wowed me once, but fails to do it again. But the second "great" book means that the writer has a style, a technique, or a way with prose, that connects with me. And that I will like most of what that author writes. Once I love a second book, that author has usually won a fan for life. Put Erik Larson on that list, because "In The Garden of Beasts" was a terrifically written book.
The first book of Larson's I read was "Devil in the White City", the story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and the serial killer, H.H. Holmes, that lived minutes from where the Fair took place. "Garden of Beasts" follows a similar vein, giving the historically important main story (FDR's first ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who arrived right when Hitler was starting to consolidate power), and mixing it with a sensationalist tangent (William's daughter Martha, who was entering Berlin as a 24 year-old attractive blond who would mix with many diplomatic officers and high-ups in the Nazi party. She was very, very popular.) Larson is an extremely good writer, and has a gift for writing true-life stories with a fiction bend. He also finds stories that fit with his written method, and make for interesting reads, and the deviant parts of his stories help with this, but for me, they do not take away from the story. Reading about how Holmes manipulated his victims was extremely interesting in "Devil", and I liked reading it, but for me, it did not overshadow the World's Fair, where American Exceptionalism made a grand statement to the world. In "Garden", it is easy to get lost in Martha Dodd's numerous affairs, and given who some of those affairs were with, her story blends in with her father's very easily. But, after a slow start, I was continually gripped by William Dodd, and his journey from a naive ambassador over his head, and flippant to the idea of a German government that was overstepping it's bounds, to a disgraced former diplomat, removed from a Germany that did not want him there and traveling the United States, telling anybody who would listen that Germany was bent on war, and had already made dangerous inroads towards that ambition. Unfortunately, Dodds was unpopular with most of the American diplomatic corp before he even stepped onto Europe, and his unwillingness to "act" like an ambassador (i.e. impudently spend money he didn't have), and the stories told of his free-loving daughter, who at one point was dating the head of the Gestapo and then followed that by falling in love with a Soviet spy, won him no allies at home.
I could have populated this post with stories on Martha Dodd, there were certainly enough of them, but that would not have been representative of why I like Larson so much. Reading the various liasons with her numerous suitors would probably make a great post, but by the 2nd half of the book, I really didn't care about Martha, William's struggles and the American Government's fingers-in-their-ears attitude towards the Nazi government was so much more compelling. And that's why Larson is a great writer, not becuase he shines the light on whatever sex/violence he can find to get you reading (and I'm not saying he's not good at that, or that it's not interesting stuff), it's that he finds the angles in every part of the story that make it interesting. I'll make my point this way; my favorite character in "Devil in the White City" is not Holmes, or the man in charge of putting the Fair together, although both get their due. My favorite character is Fredick Olmstead, the landscaping artist who has a vision for his craft, and that vision is an extreme hatred of any landscapes that look like they were landscapes, including flowerbeds. Anytime anybody tried to put an actual flowerbed into the fairgrounds, Olmstead threw an ungodly fit. And even though he was not in the book much, and the World's fair wasn't even his greatest accomplishment (He's one of the designers of Central Park in NY), I love hearing about his plans, dream, and disappointments for "The White City". Many authors would not have said much about Olmstead, but Larson saw why he was an enthralling character. It takes a talented non-fiction writer to pull that out of a story. And that's why I'm trying to decide which of his books to read next.
The other good book I've read lately was....
Pillars of The Earth- Assigned to me by Alan. Alan! Not as good as the other book I've read on his behalf, and I could honestly go over several things about "Pillars" that kinda rubbed me wrong. The Bad Guys are a little too bad; the conflict in the book is repetitious, blah blah blah. The characters of the book, though, are very well done, and easy to connect to, and that's what I really love about the book, the people were very well written, villains excluded. I am usually an easy mark for historical fiction, especially if I know about the history involved, which was not the case with "Pillars". And I can't say the focus of the architecture of Cathedrals in Europe of the 1100's really did anything for me. But Phillip's (the pious monk) point of view, which shed some light on the life of Monks back then, was very engrossing, and I have to say, after reading, and talking with Joe about, the Game of Thrones books for the last couple of months, it was nice to find a less modern-stained take on midevil times. Pillars is recommended for anybody, and I might have to read the second book in the series. Who know where that will lead?
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