Quotes from Erik Larson

Coveting power for power's sake was a "base" pursuit

Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf's head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and "how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel," it was much more than just a cookbook.

Camille's rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.

But Hitler's government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.

There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.

One day Beatrice entered their stateroom to find Marconi consigning his dirty socks to the sea through a porthole. Stunned, she asked him why. His explanation: It was more efficient to get new ones than wait for them to be laundered.

Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he "could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.

You had to know Putzi to really dislike him. That

I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.

among the population of Americans who expressed anti-Semitic leanings, a common jibe described the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt as the "Rosenberg administration.

These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.

Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation's current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.

sun shines," wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, "and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are in prison, possibly dead." The

On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: "And I have loved Germany so.

For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was

would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a "prize court" would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. While energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their reports are shorter.

We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.

In an aside to his own parliamentary secretary, Churchill said, "Love me, love my dog, and if you don't love my dog you damn well can't love me.

The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, "The election here is a farce." Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners—96 percent—voted in favor of Hitler's government. On

Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. —DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy: Canto I

Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need....