History in Erik Larson's hands is both immediate and portentous: we are right there with his characters, wondering what is going to happen next. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Crown, May) meticulously depicts what life was like for an American family of four living in Germany in 1933, when storm troopers began their vicious attacks and Jews were disenfranchised from their lives.

"What I set out to do was get a sense of what it would have been like in Berlin in that very important but overlooked first year of Hitler's rule," Larson says.

"I had read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and was inspired by it. I wondered, had I lived there, would I have guessed what was coming?

I tried for as many details as I could to bring it alive, even down to the color of the cars."

The book focuses on William Dodd, the ambassador to Berlin, and his daughter, Martha, among whose intimates were Thornton Wilder and Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. The biggest challenge, Larson says, was making sure that his source material was accurate. "Martha in her memoir is an unreliable narrator. Boris, one of her significant suitors, she never even mentions, though in her papers she does. But then you open a folder from her papers and there is a calling card from Joseph Goebbels, and you realize she really did know these people." Dodd's wife, Mattie, by contrast, plays an insignificant role in the book. "There's just not that much on her," Larson says. "That's one of the problems of nonfiction. You have to go with what you've got."

Larson calls this a complete departure from earlier work—Isaac's Storm and Devil in the White City, among other bestsellers. But they all have the same goal: to create an experience of a time and a place so people will come away with the feeling they've actually lived there. He describes himself as "as an animator of history." Major influences include Walter Lord's A Night to Remember and Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August. "In both cases I still find myself hoping the Titanic won't sink and that the war won't happen."

After speaking at this morning's Book & Author Breakfast, Larson is signing books at the Random House booth (4420), 10–11 a.m.