by Anna Funder
bookshelves: nonfiction, summer-2014, fraudio, published-2003, tbr-busting-2014, germany, journalism, autobiography-memoir, politics, eye-scorcher, history, berlin, betrayal, casual-violence, cold-war, lifestyles-deathstyles, ouch, rid-the-world-of-tyrants, totalitarian Read from May 22 to July 31...
I read this book because I recently visited the former East Germany, and I was curious about life in the DDR. This book - the story of an Australian journalist who moves to Germany and searches for former Stasi members and their victims to interview - is very easy to read. Unfortunately, I found m...
Very interesting.***Read For Brother***
There are few defining historical moments in one’s life – the type that sears itself on one’s memory so that one can always remember where one was or what one was doing when the moment occurred. For me, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of those moments. Coming home from school, I first caught a g...
The public underground toilets of Alexanderplatz, Berlin in the early 1990s. It's the wee hours and it's snowing outside onto the vast tarmac and concrete rectangle of the empty square. In the toilets, drunken toothless men zip up their flies. The smell of disinfectant and urine, the sight of vomit ...
ETA: I want to make myself really clear. I wanted to give this book five stars. That is how I reacted; I thought it was amazing and astounding what the author depicted through this book. It was only my head that reduced one star because I was a bit annoyed by some of the generalizations. I thoroughl...
This work gets its name from the Stasi – which was the internal army by which the East German government kept control (just like NKVD in USSR). Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose.In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German his...
I remember when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember being glued to the news during these events and being excited and happy that things were changing in the world. But, I was far more familiar with the U.S.S.R. than I was the GDR. This may have been because I hung out with a few Russian Studies ...
Reviewed in SHELF AWARENESS Readers' Issue, 9/23/11:http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=30#m640
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