Larson tells the story of William E. Dodd, an academic who was Chancellor of the Department of History at the University of Chicago and working on a history of the Old South when Franklin Delano Roosevelt named him ambassador to Germany in 1933. Accompanied by his wife, Mattie, 24-year-old daughter Martha, and 28-year-old son Bill, Dodd was not equipped to be a diplomat, let alone in Hitler’s Germany. Though forced by Roosevelt and the anti-Semitic State Department to step down in 1937, Dodd distinguished himself after that with his prescient warnings about Hitler’s intentions and rearmament. Too bad he was not listened to. His daughter ends up spying for the Soviets and her romantic life is the most interesting part of the book.