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dropbear123 t1_jcbnisd wrote

Reply to Bookclub and Sources Wednesday! by AutoModerator

Managed to get through 2 books (reviews copied and pasted) -

The Radium Girls:The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

>4.5/5 rounding down for Goodreads.

>Very good about women in the 1920s who got sick from painting glow in the dark watches with radium based paint. Covers their illness, the coverup by the companies involved, and the fight to get compensation. Lots of in-depth medical detail on the damage done to the women’s bodies. Overall very good.

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

>3.75/5. Not a must-read but decent if you want an accessible book about Americans in Nazi Germany.

>The book is mainly about the American ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha in 1933-34 Berlin. The main topics it covers are attempts to stop attacks on Americans by the SA, Dodd’s attempts to warn the USA about the danger of the Nazis while also fighting the rich pro-German clique in the state department, and the growing terror of the Nazis. Dodd’s daughter Martha starts off quite pro-Nazi but becomes very opposed over the course of the book due to witnessing the violence and oppression. The main bit of the book, 1933-1934, ends with the Night of the Long Knives and it’s aftermath (this part being the best of the book) but has about 50 pages after that for the rest of the 30s and what happened next to the main people involved. The book is good for the lives of the well-off in this period as well as the interactions between the ambassador and the various Nazis.

>The book is well written and because it is focused one on family you don’t really need to know much about the time period to read it.

I'm now about halfway through Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild which has been fantastic so far, no complaints (his books Kings Leopold's Ghost about the Congo Free State and To End All Wars about WWI British concientious objectors are also great and worth reading)

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