>> what are you reading this summer? "book tv" wants to know. >> there is a book about machiavelli that is sitting on my desk several weeks ago. so i want to read about it. i want to read that book about machiavelli. and then there's a book called, reckless. which what went on in terms of the financial crisis in the country and what led up to it and involves two local businesses, freddie mac and fannie mae. and so i have, i know lots of the players and i'm curious to read and find out what happened there. and then there's some things that i want to go back and read. there was recently a controversy about huck finn and the use of the "n" word. and there was a professor who took it out of the text. and this sparked a controversy about sanitizing american history or in the

context of my own book, sort of politically-correct speech code and how inappropriate it was given the fact that mark twain, samuel clemens, wrote it with the power of that word intended. so i wanted to take a look at what the sanitized, if you will, text looks like. so i picked up that book. again that is sitting on my desk. and then there are two books, i'm trying to remember their names, and i, such an opportunity to help out authors that i'm reading but one is a book by lawrence block, who is a mystery writer. and i think it is called, "a drop of the hard stuff". it is a mystery novel. and lawrence block, to me just a terrific, terrific mystery writer. that is actually at the top of my list. if i wasn't hear tonight i would go read lawrence

block. yeah, i think lawrence block is terrific. and george peliconis who is a mystery writers writes about mysteries set in washington, d.c. his wife told me about it. she exercises the same y i go to. so i'm looking forward to that, because he has, he set scenes on streets that i travel every day. so i want to sea what george has done. >> tell us what you're reading this summer. send us a tweet at "book tv". next on "book tv" erik larson accounts the first american ambassador to hitler's germany. william dodd. he became friendly with many members of hitler's ss and until berlin began to change and became aware of jewish persecution. this is about 50 minutes. >> this is terrific to be back in chicago. it always is.

especially on an actual nice day. i was here, i was here last week. it was 45 degrees. it was strange. i have to tell you that this makes me tremendously, tremendously nostalgic for the days when nobody came to my talks. [laughter] and i always like to tell this story about my very first book event which took place when i was living in baltimore. it was just after i had published a book called, the naked consumer. [laughter] exactly, exactly. it is a book that nobody bought. nobody read. one guy read it and reviewed the book and hated it because he was the target of the book. he was, this book was about, by the way how corporations spy on individual consumers. very apt today perhaps. so i did get a call though when i was living in

baltimore to go up to lancaster, pennsylvania, to do a talk. not do a talk actually, a signing, a street signing. i have since learned sunday afternoon talks are death and especially when you do a talk in lancaster, pennsylvania, on the first warm day after six months of hard winter. one of those things where you're stuck in the back of the bookstore. you've seen these people, right? there's a table. there are about 40 books on the table and there you are. mersfully somebody at the bookstore made a plate of chocolate chip cookies and put them next to me. so i sat there, booked in for about three hours. i sat there for the first hour and a half with nobody coming to talk to me. they were looking at books all around to me but nobody was coming to talk to me. nobody made eye contact and of course nobody bought the book. at about the hour and a half point i looked up and this woman was coming towards me with this big smile on her

face. she is taking, you know, just looks like she is taking the greatest delight in this event. i see her coming. i take my pen out. now i know my career is on its way. she comes up to the table and she says, how much are the cookies? [laughter] so the writing life is not what you would imagine it to be. let me just first say, since i'm here in this lovely venue, i'm a huge fan of libraries. i'm not just sucking up when i say that. i like to think of myself as the indiana jeans of jones of libraries repelling down the 900 levels of dewey desmat system looking for a book. the dewey decimal system created by melville dewey who was rabid anti-semite. i love libraries, if you

were to give me a choice between a night with cate blanchett or a night locked alone in the library of congress, i would take the night with cate blanchett in a heartbeat but, but, i do love libraries. i do love libraries. i thought i would talk about this new book of mine, "in the garden of beasts" and how it came about. i'm alarmed within my publishing company, crown publishinging within the company they're inherently lazy, they call the book almost exclusively by its acronym, itgob. which sounds like something a cat coughed up. if you say itgob while growling you sound just like the possessed girl in the exorcist. take that home with you, you know? [laughter]

at first glance this may not seem like my kind of book necessarily. here it is. this book is set in 1933-34 in nazi germany. hitler, the whole deal. here's the thing, this is exactly my kind of thing because it is about a period that people, i certainly, people think they know an awful lot about but i would argue really don't. i certainly did not. there is a tendency to view the period 1933 to 1945 as one block of homogenous horror, war, holocaust and so forth when in fact there were distinct phases. so this is how the idea came to me. first of all the idea hunt for me as some of you may have heard me talk in the past is a very, very hard time. my publicist and friend refers to it as, the dark country of no ideas.

and when i'm in that dark country of no ideas i get very moody. i get sort of annoyed with myself because i want to be productive and i don't ever feel productive when i'm sitting around sucking my thumb thinking about what idea i'm going to do next. so i was in this dark country of in ideas back about five or six years ago wondering what i was going to do next when i just thought, you know? i'm going to go to the bookstore, browse the history section and kind of get a sense for myself of what books look interesting, what resonates with me. what covers turn me off. what covers turn me on? sort of start my mind thinking about stuff. i saw a book, faceout, always on my must-read list because i never read it because it was too intimidating a prospect. 1200 pages. teeny type. no photographs. some of you are thinking it is the bible but, in fact it was, william shearer's rise

and fall of the third reich. terrific book. i bought it. bought it home. started reading it. it was a like a thriller. fell in love with the book. it was great. if can be said you can fall in love with a book about the third reich. it was a terrific book. i must be a little bit slow about things because it was only a third of the way through the book that realized, wait a minute, william shearer had actually been there in 1933-34. he had been, actually in 34. he had come to berlin in 1934, pretty much stayed there as a correspondent until kicked out when the u.s. entered the war. so suddenly i started to think, wow what would that have been like? he met these people face-to-face. he met hitler. he met gehring, him letter, globals, all these people we - dgoebbels all these people we know as monsters. he met them at a time nobody knew what the ending would be. he met them at a time no one

had inkling the holocaust was coming down the pike. the second world war was in the relatively near future. so i started thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to try to capture a sense of that time? through the eyes of a couple of characters who were new to berlin, outsiders. ideally outsiders and ideally americans because i write for an american audience. so i very deliberately began to read. i went to my library, my favorite library the liar bray remember on the -- university of washington campus. i began to read. i took out as many terrific histories as i could. the grand histories by sir ian kershaw and a series of book by richard evans and al been bullock's history of biography of hitler and so forth. in the 900 levels i fought found a lot of memoirs and

diaries and so forth from that period and also before and after. eventually i came across the diary of a chicago man named william e. dodd. soon afterward a memoir by his daughter martha. so let me try and set the scene. e. dodd. you are 63 years old. you are a mild-mannered professor of history at the university of chicago. you have a good national reputation but you know, you're no jackson turner. you're william dodd, professor of history, struggling in this time with financial short falls because this is the era of the great depression. you are tired of the engulfing demands of graduate students. all you really want to do is finish a book you've been working on. it is actually a multi--volume series of books about the old south which in fact kind of

ironically you have titled, the rise and fall of the old south. suddenly one very hot day in june you are sitting at your desk, this is in 1933, you're sitting at your desk at noon precisely the phone rings. the guy at the other end of the line is franklin delano roosevelt, the new president of the united states and one little note, he was president at that point since his inauguration in march in 1933. inauguration day was still in march. it was subsequently changed to january because the feeling was you didn't want to have a president be a lame duck for any longer than he absolutely had to be. so, roosevelt's on the line and he asks you would you be the next ambassador to germany? america's first ambassador

to nazi germany. the post ambassador of germany has been vacant at this point for about six months. here's the kegger. he gives you two hours to decide. gives you two hours to decide. what he does not tell you is that one reason he has called you apart from the fact that a confidante of his recommended you, apart from the fact that you know german, one reason he has called you is because nobody else wanted the job. [laughter] three weeks later you find yourself on a ship to germany, leaving new york for hamburg. you've got your family with you. your wife, a grown son, and your 24-year-old daughter, martha. and martha is one heck of a daughter. she is the one who hooked me. she is smart.

she is sexy. she's a flirt and she has this thing. she's got it. she has a way about her that inflames the passions of men both young and not so young. at 24 she already had an affair with poet and author, carl sandberg. one of the delight of research process, why i always do my own research while i was going through martha's papers at the library of congress, in one file i came across two locks of carl sandberg' hair in a little clear plastic, archival envelope tied with the old black coats and clark thread. it looked like little broom heads. i tell you his hair was white as it appeared, was very coarse, thick, coarse hair. magical moment for me. [laughter] i'm just that way. but, at 24 she had this

affair with carl sandberg. she has broken two engagements to be married and in the midst of a divorce to escape a dead marriage to a new york banker. now personally, i think any marriage to a new york banker would be dead but i don't want, i don't want to cast any aspersions due to the late financial crisis in america but she is also by this time very close friends with thornton wilder. so she has a very interesting kind of circle. she comes along to berlin for the adventure and immediately falls in love, falls in love with the so-called nazi revolution. she calls it the nazi revolution. she finds it intoxicating at first. and here's the thing. she was not alone. this was a fairly common viewpoint in 1933. the argument was, you could quarrel with hitler's methods, i say so, you could quarrel with his methods but on the other hand he was

restoring the nation's pride, helping to get its act together, promising to drastically reduce unemployment and seeming by year's end to be delivering on that promise. the fact the need before the dodds left new york, they all gathered there in order to catch their ship, they went to a dinner party at the very swank apartment of a fellow named charles r. crane of the crane plumbing dynasty. you men out there, you may have not realized it but i'm sure you have seen the crane logo staring up at you from urinenals around the country. i can't speak for the ladies room. charles crane has this party. mind you this is back in 1933. no reflection on crane plumbing today but charles crane, as the party is winding down, dodds are leaving, charles crane takes the new ambassador aside and says to him, let hitler have his way. he also advises dodd, very

directly, not to have any social interaction with jews while he is in berlin. now let's look at the world through martha's eyes. she finds herself in a vibrant, charismatic city. we always think of that world, i certainly did, as drab, black and white, shaded in grays merely because that is the kind of imagery we come across. we see black and white photographs. we see news reels. there are some color images that have surfaced but for the most part seems like a black and white world. seems like there wasn't a bright sunny day in germany until 1965 when kodachrome became the film of choice. she saw something very different than the black and white world. she saw color everywhere. trams, brightly-colored trams which ran on all the main streets just as perfect as toys. every balcony had a box of red geraniums or seemed to

at least. at christmas the city went wild. there were christmas lights everywhere. christmas trees of every square. christmas trees on every street corner. so much so dodd was moved to write, you would almost think the nazis believed in jesus. there were glorious cafes sat hundreds of people at a time. there was dancing every night at these fabulous nightclubs like the roof of the hotel eden. chero's, and very interesting establishment called, house vaderland in berlin. it was a five-story structure that the had five restaurant/nightclub venues in it. one of which was an american wild west bar. this is in nazi germany by the way. an american wild west bar where germ man in these huge cowboy hats would serve you these cocktails and presumeably some of the germans were members of the nazi party. kind of a nice thought these

cowboys, nazi cowboys serving you drinks. appealed to me any way. [laughter] here we have an ambassador, ambassador dodd arriving in germany as a professor history from his studies he arrives with a certain expectation. he has studied statesman and yes they do crazy things but in the end they act like statesmen. certain rationality even in the craziest people. he also arrives bearing a certain amount of pleasant baggage. back in the 1890s like many students, he traveled to germany to complete listedcation to do postgraduate education. he went to lines sig to work on -- line sig, to work on ph.d thesis, which is about thomas jefferson. he is in lipz sig, he has a wonderful time. germans are sweet people. every morning a person places violets in his room

so he comes bearing the fond recollection. the world he encounters is nothing like he expected. he expected a certain fine only pathology. not just pathology i'm talking about organic pathology. his counsel general writes in a dispatch at about this time, that the leading three in germany, hitler, gehring, in any other cult triwould be placed in an asylum. here is his daughter, dodd's daughter who in effect falls in love with the pathology at first. i reallies that the two stories provided an ideal vehicle for traveling through that period. i would not have wanted to write about dodd alone. i'm not a fan of diplomatic history. i wouldn't have wanted to write only about martha. i'm not sure i could sustain an entire book about her.

but the two together captured something much bigger i think. both in fact provide divergent windows on the whole period and both actually undergo a very satisfying transformation in the course of that very first year of theirs in berlin which most of the action in the book takes place, summer of 33 and summer 34 when something quite horrific occurs that the united states and the rest of the world should have paid much more attention to but failed to do so i realize the stories shed light if you're looking for more fundamental reason for doing this story, really shed light on why it took so long for america and the world to realize the true danger of hitler and the world and were appeasement became the first path of dealing with these people. some of the things that surprised me.

and this may not come as a surprise to certain people in this room, i don't know. but to me it was a shock. the extent, intensity of anti-semitism in the united states and also within the upper ranks of the state department itself. lower level of secretary cordell hull. i was really startled by it. first a note about secretary you will hull. he was interesting guy. it was perfect guy to be secretary of state at this time would be cordell hull. he had some quirks. his passion was croquet and his, and he had a speech i am pedment. he had a speech impediment people around him likened to the cartoon character elmer fudd [laughing] which led roosevelt to a lively sense of fun, when hull was not around he would quietly mock this, this

speech impediment. if he was refering to hull's trade treaties he would refer to refer to them as hull's, twade tweaties. below him the top three guys in the state department had a healthy if not outright hatred, certainly distaste for jews. one referred to them openly and readily as kikes. dodd himself had expressed a certain level of anti-semitism. in one, really kind of startling dispatch back to the state department after he had been in berlin for a while he complained that he had had too many jews on his staff. too many jews on his staff. this was impairing his ability to deal with the nazi regime. he particularly complained about his receptionist who absolutely loathed the nazis. sitting woman at the earned

trias nazi officials came through. personally i think made for a mini-series but, so you have dodd complaining about there took many jews on his staff. there is also one very strange conversation dodd has with hitler. there were two formal meetings he has during this time period. the second meeting dodd actually tries to find common ground with hitler on the so-called, jewish problem. the nazis hijacked the debate by framing it as a jewish problem. words matter. once you frame something as a jewish problem, what else do you think about? how do you solve that problem? so there was a jewish problem. dodd said, you know, we have our own jewish problem in america but we have chosen to solve it in a more humane fashion by which he is referring to like university quotas and so forth. this by the way does not mollify hitler, surprise, surprise.

hitler gets all steamed up again and he just loses it completely, which was a tendency of his. he says, if the jews don't stop this, i will put an end to all of them. this is 1934. this is long before the holocaust. 1934 you get the first whiff of what was coming down the pike. i was also struck by how, how new everything was then. you know all the things that we today know as absolute tropes of the nazi era were unfamiliar back then. for example, the goose-step which when dodd first saw it, it was as astonished how ridiculous it seemed. it is just ridiculous. there was the swastika, which was so new at this point in the embassy it was not referred to as the swastika. it was referred to as the broken cross which is the literal translation of the term that the germans used.

the hitler salute, this thing. i'm not going to do it because it's, it still has a jarring effect, also, i would be a little bit concerned if i actually did it that would be the moment that somebody would take a digital photograph. [laughter] put it on the web t would go viral and, suddenly i would have a lot of new friends that i don't necessarily want. [laughter] the salute was so novel that dodd's counsel general in berlin, top foreign service guy in berlin, a man named george messersmith, not to be confused with wily messer schmidt the aircraft designer. george messersmith was american through and through. hated the nazis, happily, happily, messer smith -- messersmith treated the third reich kind of the way an anthropologist would treat a be a bore original

tribe. he wet at detail and length about all kinds of things because this was brand new. swastika, let me backtrack a second. the swastika itself was not a brand new thing. i personally own a collection of the works of rudyard kipling published in the 1890s, every book on his binding has a swastika because it is indian good luck sign. but as a political symbol in the modern age this was brand new. back to the hitler salute. so messersmith, who by the way wrote so long on so many subjects was nicknamed, 40-pages george, he wrote analysis, series of observations about the hitler salute because this was such a novel thing. i just read a brief, only thing i'm going to read, i promise you. the salute he wrote, had no modern precedent, say for the more narrowly required salute of soldiers in the presence of superior

officers. what made the practice unique everyone was expected to salute in most mundane encounters. shopkeepers saluted customers. children were required to salute their teachers several times a day. at closing of thee at trick call -- theatrical performance they sang the german national anthem and storm trooper anthem. the vessel song. the german public so avidly embraced salute making act of obsess antly saluting almost comical. everyone from the lowliest messenger and love at thisest official saluted and heil one another. turning a walk to the restroom into an exhausting affair. [laughter] my hope was to capture a sense of gradual darkening. had this vision of the dodds suddenly as two characters in a nonfiction grimm

brothers' fairry tale. they enter the dark wood and things get darker and darker and darker or, or, you know, cue the "wizard of oz" song, lions, tigers and bears, as you're moving into the darkness of the third reich. so i talk about, for example, secret drafts of future nazi laws. these were not laws yet. these were drafts of things coming. including one that shocked him. literal translation of this document being, the law for the killing of incurables. another kill chilling foreshadowing of what was to come.

>> diehls was an unusual character. he presided over an entity that caused the imprisonment of thousands of come -- communists and jews that resigned over an agency that tortured hundreds of people and likely murdered in scores, but dodd in particular thought of him as a good guy.

he had a lot of integrity. he was the guy you went to. if you wanted an american, you would go to rudolph, and he'd obliged. he agitated for the christmas amnesty of 1933 that let a lot of prisoners out of camp and so forth in germany, and he claimed later that was one of his finist moments of his career when he got to choose who went free. he's an interesting character, had a physical relationship with martha. in the library of congress, there's a picture of martha and others having the grandest time. i find that magical.

this is an evil character, potentially evil character with the daughter of the american ambassador to germany. also, one other thing about rudolph diehls, just as halves the perfect embodiment of secretary of state, if you were to try to imagine what a villain, what kind of villain, you would imagine rudolph to a point. he was thin, dark, lean, with a horribly scared face, the lower part of his face, scared by a practice a lot of his students were engaged in which was bare blade dualing. a doctor within the dual would call it, everybody gets stitched up, and that's the end of it, and you beared the scars for the rest of your lives, but they were a badge of strength and heroism.

the thing was he was considered to be a catch. he was handsome in a dark scared way. he was -- well, look at the photograph, i'll tell you, you might believe me. he was said to be sexually charismatic. he was a charmer, and, you know, it's funny, i show this picture to a number of women in seattle most recently to a editor and photographer, and everybody looks at the guy and goes, yeah, not bad, not bad. [laughter] i learned also in by the way, in looking at the gustapo that one way they summoned people was by postcard and so you got a postcard saying could you come to gustapo head quarterren on such and such a date and time. we'd like to talk to you, you know? you had no choice.

i mean, what were you going to do? flee the country? if you didn't go, they'd hunt you down. the german population had become so anxious to fall into line, the term was "coordinated" and fall into line with the ethos of the nazi party that they would denounce neighbors who had not like wise seem fit to act in a coordinated fashion. they would also denounce neighbors to resolve petty personal disputes. if you department like the way your neighbor was keeping up the house, you'd drop a dime on them with the gustapo, and they would drop you a card or follow you a visit because they checked on everything. people were ratting out their friends and neighbors so much that even hitler complained.

hitler complained, and i quote, "we are living at present in a sea of denuns nations and human meanness." this is adolf hitler. [laughter] anyway, i'm very happy to report early readers get it. what i'm finding is there's a narrative tension that you all bring to the book, this idea we all know what's happening, and here's people you just want to say don't go into the basement, you know what i mean? like horror films. the favorite reaction is from a friend of mine who read it before going to sleep at night, that's a possible bad thing, just saying. she woke up weeping from a nightmare in which she was pursued by nazis and all she had

to protect her was her little purple water bottle. [laughter] now, if i can give somebody nightmares, beside my wife, if i can give somebody nightmares, i consider that from a narrative standpoint a victory. [laughter] i'll stop there and take questions. i hope you have a lot of questions, and if you don't, i have questions for you. [applause] thank you [applause] questions? oh, and by the way, i think the point is you have to go to the microphones here, so that adds pressure. come down to the microphones and speak because we've got c-span folk recording this. these people are either leaving or asking a question. [laughter] okay, you first.

>> hi, i'm tracy. as far as your writings, is there an idea you started researching, writing for a book and then decided, yeah, this is not going to work, and if so, what was it about? >> yes. second question. [laughter] >> what was it about? >> i won't tell you what it was about because you never know, but just recently having been and still am in that dark country of new ideas, i had an idea that seemed to me to have all the right elements, and i was looking into it and looking into it and something that took place in california, and i was just, wow, i didn't know anything about this, and there were great characters and stuff, but there was just something missing, and i worked on it for a long time until i realized i think the best way to put it is it lacked heart. it lacked heart, so i killed it much to my agent's sorrow, but i'm not sorry, i'm glad it's

dead. good question though, thank you. yes? >> i just read the book yesterday evening, not too late. >> did you wake up crying? >> no. what struck you as the most surprising things in your research? the fact there was less than 1% of jewish people in germany because the point is it's an overriding issue and the fact that dodd was not reporting all the attacks on americans. i had no idea there were actually -- >> [inaudible] >> that surprised me, but what surprised you with the research? we think we know the era, but we really don't. >> yeah, you hit on a couple things. just the fact, and, you know, it's there for anybody to know, and i think it was kershaw who really made the point that only about 1% of germans were in fact jewish. i mean, it's also probably not well-known and certainly should be well-known that most of the victims of the holocaust were

not germans but from the eastern countries subsequently invaded by the nazis. only 1% of germans were jews. for most germans. the whole antisemitic thing was an abstract concept because the average german had little to no contact with jews. jews were concentrated in the big cities. the typical rural german had either no contact with jews or limited contact, and it was almost invariably fine, you know? this whole antisemitic thing was meant for the like believers, the party members, and so forth. that's fascinating. anybody who wants to look into that more, check out kershaw's work. it's fantastic. i was impressed by that thing as well. the level of anti-semitism in the state department is what i found most startling. dodd's efforts to keep these attacks on americans from making

the press i found really startling. the point was he was trying to -- he was trying not to antagonize the germans in a belief he could use persuasion and reason to help hitler find and the government find a more moderate way to go which in the course of the first year he realized, thankfully, at the end was not going to happen, so that was one. thank you. yes? >> i'm curious about the obstacles you might have encountered in your research, and do you speak german? you know, access to the or -- archives. >> yeah, sure. she's obviously asking about obstacles. german, as it happens, was not an obstacle. i do not speak german, but had a translater including an

autobiography called "ulcipher at the gates." what i wanted to concentrate on exclusively really was the point of view of my two americans entering this world, and that led me to tremendous troves of documents in the library of congress, national archives, and the wisconsin historical society in madison, wisconsin of all places; so the main obstacle is like any other book which is finding the material. you have to go the distance and find the material. i have loved going to berlin and seeing what's there now and also getting a feel for berlin, little subtle things. for example, one of the things i didn't know or appreciate -- i wouldn't have known -- is how close everything and all the

action in this book takes place around the park, the central park in berlin called the tear garden which is in literal translations is garden of beasts, hence the title. all the places that are important to the action are actually around the eastern quarter of this park. what i learned by going there was that everything was so close together, just a matter of 15 minute walk from dodd's house to headquarters to hitlers. i don't know why that was important, but it was. everything was so compact, and berlin is also a very flat city. first time i opened my hotel window and looked out over berlin and the tear garden is the first thing that came to mind is this is corpus christi. i don't know why. [laughter] it's very flat. it's berlin.

anyway, sure. >> hello. i'm a very big fan of yours, and i think all of us are -- i know we all feel truly gifted to -- we all feel gifted to partake in your stories. >> closer to the mic. >> we feel gifted to partake in your stories. >> say it again. [laughter] i'm sorry. [laughter] >> i have a feeling that at the end of the 21st century i think the devil in the white city will be considered one of the century's greatest books. the devil in the white sea will be. i just started reading your new book, and i just wanted to ask you as a writer, you have a very engaging manner i feel. just listening to you talk, and i just wonder -- the story telling come naturally to you, and how difficult is it to be a really good writer such as yourself? have you encountered

discouragement along the way? i mean, you talked about the selling of the cookies at the table. we know about that, but when did you feel like i know i can do this, i know i got it, i'm a great story teller, and along the way, have you encountered doubts in yourself? i'm just curious because i know -- >> my middle name is self-doubt. >> your stories are so engaming -- engaging. i feel you talk to me when i'm reading the book, and it's a wonderful feeling and a great thing to pick up the book and feel like you're talking to me. i just love that. i'm curious, are you encouraged, have you encountered discouragement along the way? >> i'll address that. in fact, i'm going to let my daughter address that. would you step up and tell the audience the reality? this is my daughter.

she goes to the university of chicago, lauren larson. [applause] >> i live with him. [laughter] he's racked with self-doubt all the time. [laughter] he works four to eight in the morning, and then he worries for the rest of the day. [laughter] >> thank you, that's enough. [laughter] >> it is true. it is in fact true that self-doubt is something that i mean something i have to deal with all the time, and i like to think it drives me to really hunt for stories that are the kind of thing that i'm going to like and that people, other people are actually going to like, but i sure as hell wish there was some elixir i could take to give me one day i was not afraid something was going to be a bomb. case in point, when devil on the

white city, on the eve of the publication, i was convinced, check with anybody in my family, i was convinced that my career was over. [laughter] because this was a book that had two narratives that never intersected and broke all the rules of narrative. they intersect at one small point, and so there you go. i had similar fears for this one, so there you go. yes? >> you touched on antisemitism, and i was not aware the ambassador was a professor of history. he was a professor of history, and i guess my question to you is did he he have any kind of historical inkling of anti-semitism in history? you read rare tin luther and he doesn't have nice things to say

about jews in the 1600s, so does he kind have any sense of anti-semitism in germany? >> good question. here's the weird thing. yes, he did have a sense of the fact that anti-semitism had been prevalent, you get the sense a lot of times that in terms of anti-semitism nazis dropped in from mars or something, but they did drop in from mars, but nothing to do with anti-semitism. [laughter] anti-semitism had been a theme as dodd points out in germany for a long time and in other cultures as well, of course, but what's interesting, at the same time, dodd was somehow ail to ignore his own tendency to be antisemitic, what we today see as anti-semitism on his part was in his era an imminent thing that they expressed and were not

uncomfortable with it because you saw evidence in this that these guys in their diaries knowing they could become public, are very clear and very direct about their dislike of jews. so another question. >> yes, you over there. >> i thank you very much for your time and thoughtful presentation. i was just wondering, do you think ultimately dodd was the right person for the position, and do you find yourself sympathizing with kind of his struggles and maybe lack of otherwise confronting the nazis? >> good question. you know, studying the idea of it was the kind of the position that nobody could have done anything terribly productive in, nobody could have really persuaded hitler to do

otherwise, i do have to say that given his mandate, roosevelt sent him there with the fundmental position to serve as a standing example of american liberal values, and dodd did that dodd never sucked up to the nazis or caved in to the nazis. he held true to that mandate much to the absolute annoyance of the third reich. he really ticked off the germans just by refusing to give on those fundamental principles and ultimately, i don't want to throw out anything spoilers in terms of the book, so i do think there's a tendency by historians to overlook dodd as a failed ambassador. i don't think that's at all correct. i think if i had to give him a letter grade given the circumstances, i would give him the curve of the era. i would give him a b-plus, so

yes? one more total? okay. you're it. this better be good. no pressure. >> boy. [laughter] i know if this is a great question, but i loved your book devil in the white city, and i understand there's a film coming out. two questions. what's your level of involvement in the film, and if you're concerned about often when they make movies from books, they hollywood-ize them. >> good questions. the option was bought by leonardo dei cap pree yo. there's no screen play yet, so it will take awhile. my involvement is going to be minimal because i espouse the tom wolf approach to hollywood is that you bring your book to the fence, take the bag of money, and run.

[laughter] because -- [applause] because -- [applause] because hollywood, if you're a writer who wants to have control over your own work, hollywood will, and i'm not -- no question -- will break your heart. hollywood will break your heart, so really it comes down to when do you decide to sign over an option, you make a decision at that point, do i want this to happen or not, and yeah, it will be interesting because at this point, i want to see what talented filmmakers and actors will make of the book, and i'm particularly interested in what the music is going to be that goes with the thing. [laughter] and who plays the victims. i'm voting for scarlett johann son and always kate blanchet. there's a movie, and that's the level of involvement i want which is essentially none.

so thank you all for coming. i'll sign. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website, eriklarsonbooks.com. >> his father died in 1969, and he simply didn't keep records of resident foreigners, births, deaths, marriages. it just was not interesting to them, so we have this account of his father's death, but it's very sparse and there's really no official transcripts to back it up. his father die, and there's no welfare state. there's no organized charity in cue wit for foreigners at the time, so his mother takes the job of washing the bodies of the dead, the female bodies of the

dead preparing them for pure -- pure yal. she has nine children at the time. years pass on, and he's doing well in school, a bookish boy, and the family decides that they can't -- they don't have any money at all, that they need to back one son to get an education, and that one son, 24 is typical in arab families of this period of time, would support the rest of them, and that son is shaik. he applies to a school in north carolina, and us hoerically baptist school in north carolina, and either the family saved money or the muslim

brotherhood of kuwait agreed to sponsor him. he joined the brotherhood after two of his older brothers joined at age 16, so he arrives in american as roughly 16 years old, and he's unprepared for what he sees. i interviewedded the man who picked him up from the airport, and what he remembers -- this is years later, but the memory he remembers is him being surprised by what he saw. firstly, surprised by the geography, the intense greenery. when you see trees in cue wit, they are privately owned. here, there's trees everywhere. more surprising and more strange and more offputting than the trees were the people and what they were doing. they were in chairs on their front lawn, grilling out, playing with their kids, taking

a hose to the bushes outside the front window, but what surprised him was so much of american family life happening in public, and this is not the kind of thing that would happen in the arab world, and the more time he spent in north carolina, the more he was persuaded that americans were really back ward. they did things that should be private in public. they trusted each other very quickly. they didn't go out at night. after dark is when most social occasions occur in kuwait and other arab countries, but in the united states in 1983, they had one pizza parlor, no bars. the town was asleep, so far from the night being alive and social and friendly, it was silent as a

tomb. it was the day when americans were busy, so he became more and more alienated by america because it was not an arab country, and these are, you know, very small observations. these things by themselves do not make him a terrorist, but it does set him at odds with the country. there's nothing that he did other than make him attend chapel service that made him part of the larger community, and, in fact, one of the things i learned in writing "master mind" is this is nothing our colleges do to integrate foreign students to explain this country to them. we take it for granted that everyone knows these things. when the fbi searchedded the car of the 9/11 hijackers, they found a small spiral bound notebook and in small careful arabic script, there's a description describing the difference between shampoo,

conditioner, and body wash. we feel we're understood, but from another culture, another time, yeah, we're puzzling. maybe an explanation is in order for foreign students. naturally he spent his time in college with not just other arab students, but other kuwait arab students. he didn't even mix with the non-kuwait arabs. he transferred to north carolina amt. he studies engineering here, but his social network is limited to 15-20 people, all of whom are muslim, all kuwaits, some transferred with him, but he emerges as someone known on campus as a mula and technically he's not, but they mean he's an enforcer and makes sure the other students in the group do not violate these very small, obscure tenants of what they

believe to be islamic law. for example, you know, the cuff of your pants can never cover your ankle. it's forbidden to wear shorts because they expose the knee and so on, so even going to the gym to work out, they would be fully covered. enforcing all of these differences kept them apart from the american college campus. i met a number of people, almost a dozen, in fact, who went to college with ksm and remember him. by the way, they remember him fondly. he was a comedian, a member of an inform mall student troupe of the friday tonight show putting on plays and skits and successfully and humorously imitate arab leaders, but his friends were the 20 other kuwait students. i couldn't find anyone who was not kuwait, arab, muslim, knew

him well in school. his lab partner just remembers him as a person with very broken english. his professors remember him being good in math and science, but never had a conversation with him about nothing that didn't involve formulas, so he was in north carolina for almost four years, but he came into contact with americans on a very glancing basis. it's as if you are changing planes in a strange city, and you walk through the airport -- have you met the people of cincinnati? not really of the you, you passed by them. he policed the social perimeter to limit contact with americans, but sometimes events intervene. one of the things i learned, a surprise to me, was he had a criminal record in the united states. i'm surprised that other investigators, the gorn