Texas City Reads 2012

This year's Texas City Reads book is Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts.

Although In the Garden of Beasts is nonfiction, it reads like fiction: suspense, scandalous love affairs, political intrigue and heartbreak.

It depicts the story of the American ambassador and his family who were stationed in Berlin in the years just before WWII, just as Hitler was gaining his power in Germany. The ambassador, William E. Dodd, was a fairly tame personality, but he had one of the hardest jobs around trying to represent American interests in Germany as Hitler gained political ground.

Dodd's daughter Mary, however, made up in spades for her father's conventionality. She was an inveterate flirt and a very opinionated young woman; later in life she became an author and then ended up fleeing the United States after being accused of spying for the Russians.

Larson does not try to hide the Dodds’ shortcomings or prejudices — for example, they didn't seem to be too bothered by the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany when they first arrived — but he also portrays their strengths, such as Dodd's admirable refusal to kowtow to the future Fuhrer.

You may recognize Larson's name; he wrote Isaac's Storm, about the 1900 hurricane that struck Galveston — the greatest natural disaster to ever strike the United States. In the Garden of Beasts has received excellent reviews and appeared on many best books lists of 2011.

Intrigued yet? Here are a few reviews of the book:

New York Times
L.A. Times
Brevity magazine, an online journal
We Heart Reading book blog
NPR

The library will have multiple copies available for check-out at the Circulation Desk. We have In the Garden of Beasts in book, large print and audiobook form. We will host discussions of the book in the Holland Meeting Room of the library in September. All are welcome at the discussions.

Eating With The Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack / by Robert Egan and Kurt Pitzer

"I just called them up." (p. 12)

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Robert Egan began life unextraordinarily enough. Raised in a "mobbed-up" working class part of northern New Jersey, he dropped out of high school in the mid-1970's, spent a few years working construction, building roofs and getting by with various odd jobs. One thing which had always interested him was war, the Vietnam War especially (Egan had intended to sign up as soon as he was old enough, but the war ended before then) and the detainment of American POW's after the war was over. After hanging out at a few local POW/MIA gatherings, in which participants staged protests, and perceiving that very little was actually being done, Egan decided to get in touch with those responsible for still detaining hostages. So, one day, he called the Vietnamese delegates at the UN (Vietnam had no direct diplomatic relations with the US at the time) and began an informal relationship.

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The Vietnamese, thinking him a plant by the American secret service, reciprocated Egan's outreach and modestly accommodated his unsolicited, non-tactical approach (Egan kept quiet about the POW's for a time). Before long, the two parties were on genuinely friendly terms, several of the delegates even frequenting Egan's newly opened Bar-B-Que stand in Hackensack where the relationship gradually built into something of a purely deformalized spot for discrete political talks. The following years went smoothly between Egan and his friendly patrons, and one day, in the early nineties, he was introduced to several North Korean officials who were in a mood to improve their country's relations with the US. An obliging Egan was soon introduced to the country's UN ambassador, Han Song Ryol, and over the next few years the two would remain in close contact, exchanging information and steadily relaying it to their requisite parties--Egan (now an informant for the FBI) to the Americans and Han to the North Koreans.

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Things remained on a virtuously casual basis with Egan actually chaperoning the visiting North Korean athetes during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, and being inolved on a uniquely intimate level with the controversial nation until the government politely intervened, putting a stop to the friendship between "Pyongyong Bobby" Egan and Han. This story is as implausible, inconceivable and thoroughly unconventional as it gets. And yet it's all true. And it's more than just a really, really wierd story. Egan's ability to engage in foreign policy at a grass roots level and establish communication with an enemy nation is a remarkable fable on the effectiveness one individual can have. (B EGAN)