A gripping page-turner that thrills like fiction.
The story of desperate East Germans crossing over, digging under, and crashing through the Berlin Wall.
Using interviews, recently declassified State Department files, unreleased film footage, and Stasi archives, Mitchell (Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made, 2012, etc.) chronicles the Russian determination to stem the tide of refugees. From the late 1940s to 1961, “some 2.8 million East Germans fled to the West,” 20 percent of them through Berlin. In response to a spike of 19,000 per month in 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed and reinforced until its fall in 1989. The central figure of Mitchell’s story is Harry Seidel, an East German cycling champion who might easily have gone to the Olympics. But he had something else on his mind. Within weeks of the building of the wall, he led his wife and son and two dozen others to freedom. The other main player is the Stasi and their thousands of spies and moles. After people died trying to leap from buildings across the wall, crash through it, or swim the River Spree, Seidel began his first tunnel. He wasn’t the only one working in the West. The Girrmann group, making fake passports and hiding refugees in cars, also began a dig, not knowing of the true identity of their East German messenger, the Stasi spy Siegfried Uhse. The author ably captures the dedication of the men and women trying to get family, friends, and complete strangers to freedom. The introduction of newsmen arranging to film the digging and paying for the privilege might have caused friction among the diggers, except that what little money was given went to supplies for the tunnels. The successes were few and failures frustrating, especially in the wake of the unknown mole, but workers were determined and started a new tunnel as quickly as one closed.
A gripping page-turner that thrills like fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90385-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.
Beloved, controversial performer discusses fame and the deeper meanings of his life.
Common, subject of Fox News’ ire following his White House poetry recitation, has long been acclaimed as a thoughtful and deft hip-hop artist. In his memoir—co-authored by Bradley (Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, 2009, etc.)—he suggests great consciousness of the cultural legacy he carries: “Chicago blackness gave me understanding, awareness, street sense, and a rhythm. I learned the way that soulful people move, act, and talk.” He portrays himself as an openhearted, curious kid, trying to understand the tumult of Chicago’s African-American South Side. Obsessed with girls from an early age, he would go to the city’s museums to meet them. At the same time, he was rhyming in private, and he gave up basketball in high school to concentrate on rap, which he saw as similarly competitive. Common writes frankly about his youthful involvement with gang culture, portrayed as an inevitable rite of passage that became increasingly violent: “Crack hit the South Side of Chicago like a balled up fist.” Varied influences—his mother, friends, artistic ambitions—steered him away from it and toward a more “conscious” existence. By 1989, his early demos as Common Sense were drawing industry attention, and he dropped out of college to pursue this calling, over his mother’s objections. Much of what follows is a funny, honest showbiz narrative, moving from hip-hop to film acting. Interestingly, each chapter begins with a “letter” to someone significant in his life: e.g., his mother and father (early chapters discuss their tumultuous relationship), Emmett Till, former girlfriend Erykah Badu and collaborator Kanye West. Additionally, his mother offers occasional italicized counterpoint. As a memoir, the book succeeds based on Common’s candor, intelligence and charm, despite occasional artificial passages and broad platitudes, and he writes powerfully about his connection with President Obama.
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2587-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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