In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin / Erik Larson 448 p.

Others have blogged about this before me and I doubt I have anything new to add. Karen's post summarizes the details perfectly: this is the story of William Dodd, ambassador to Germany in the early thirties.  He was an academic and a decent man who saw that Hitler's Germany was heading in a disastrous direction and tried to act morally in the face of that.  But he did what academics do - he wrote correspondence and briefs, he gave speeches which were condemnatory but so graceful and scholarly that they landed like feathers rather than the hammer blows that were needed.  In the end he was recalled because even his mild protests were too annoying to the Germans and the American diplomats who were of the appeasement school. 

And then there was his daughter, who features largely in the book because of her many 'friendships' with various powerful German men of the day.  So I guess I'm a prude, but I found myself distracted throughout the book by her easy virtue.  And I wondered, frankly, what in the world she was using for birth control in those Dark Ages of women's reproductive health, because she certainly would have needed something.  Sheesh.  But that's a digression.  Dodd and his daughter are two people for whom it's hard to feel much enthusiasm; it's to Larson's credit that he makes their story such a fascinating read.