A Common Reader . . .

Review: 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall - Peter Millar

Twenty years ago I sat in front of my television watching crowds stream through the Brandenburg Gate as the East German border guards finally gave up the job of trying to prevent people crossing from one side of the Berlin Wall to the other.  Anyone with a sense of history could not help but share in the jubilation as a whole nation was set free from the vast prison camp which was East Germany. 

Peter Millar, a Sunday Times journalist, was present as these historic events happened around him, and his long years of living in East Germany and Russia have equipped him to write a vibrant and involved account of 1989 and the preceding years leading up to the year of liberation.

I enjoyed reading 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall as much as anything I have read this year.  Millar's eye-witness accounts of his time in Berlin provide a ground-level view of events and serve as a useful counterpoint to the other, more scholarly books on the period which have been recently published such as Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989 (review to follow).

Despite being a "serious" journalist (Foreign Correspondent of the Year, 1989 etc), Millar has adopted an almost Bryson-esque approach to his description of his life, first as a young Reuter's correspondent and then as a journalist on national newspapers.  While his newspaper articles were serious and weighty pieces, there is obviously a humorist in his psyche too. 

Review: Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart

Ever since Jerome K Jerome had such a phenomenal and long-lasting success with Three Men In A Boat, other travellers have written humorous accounts of their exploits, increasingly so in recent years.  There seems to be a vast market for these books, and I enjoy reading them from time to time, usually as light relief from my heavy schedule of more serious books.  The range available is vast: there are accounts of going to live in foreign countries (e.g. Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde), taking on ridiculous challenges (e.g. Tony Hawkes, Round Ireland With A Fridge) or just humorous travel journals (e.g. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice).

Chris Stewart's books are firmly in this category, and I can say they are among the best.  Ever since his hugely successful Driving Over Lemons, Chris has charmed us with his light-hearted approach to seemingly impossible challenges.  I remember reading "Lemons" during a period of commuting to London in a cold winter and turning away from views across Battersea to Chris's descriptions of Andalucia, which helped me forget that I was about to join the "I did not know death had undone so many" hoards scurrying over Waterloo Bridge. 

Chris Stewart is a little like Michael Palin, in that he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, an ideal travel companion, even on the printed page. John McCarthy interviewed him on Radio 4's Excess Baggage last week about his new book Three Ways to Capsize a Boat and clearly Chris is a generous-minded man, given to self-deprecation and complete lack of boasting.  I had this book on my "to be read pile" at the time, and as I injured my knee last Sunday and was pretty much bed-ridden from Monday to Wednesday, I decided to promote "Three Ways" to the top of the pile and see if Chris could lighten my mood as he did those years ago while on the commuter train.  

Review: The Pattern in the Carpet - Margaret Drabble

I never associate jigsaws with summer, mainly because there is just too much to do in the real world outside rather than delving ever-deeper into the intricate detail of those little cardboard shapes.  Its different in winter, when afternoons become shorter, and for several days I can get absorbed in assembling the chosen picture, stopping whenever I pass the table to do just a couple more, then staying to do twenty.

I've always been slightly ashamed of my delight in this slightly time-wasting activity, and it was good to discover that people as illustrious as Margaret Drabble and her husband Michael Holroyd share my interest.  And after reading this fascinating study into all things jigsaw, I can see that there is rather more to them than just an aimless pastime.  

But The Pattern in the Carpet is far more than a history of jigsaw puzzles, for Margaret Drabble weaves her main topic around a personal memoir of her childhood and later life, not in a systematic "autobiographical" way, but perhaps more like a conversation with her readers, scattering anecdotes throughout her chapters.  

The result is a book which draws the reader on page by page, where he or she will discover fascinating stories about children's toys, books and puzzles, but will also gain some insight into Margarert Drabble's life and her writing career.  

Review: Endgame 1945 - David Stafford

I used to find history boring at school with its impersonal lists of dates and its pointless wars from centuries ago.  Over recent years however, books like Endgame 1945 have brought history to life with their combination of personal accounts and a narrative which provides a sense of immediacy and relevance to today's world. 

In Endgame 1945, David Stafford manges to cover the whole arena of the Nazi clear-up operation in which the Allies swept across Europe from the west and up the back-bone of Italy.  He uses the personal records of many people, but focusing particularly on British Intelligence Officer Geoffrey Cox, Fred Warner, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and Rober Reid, a BBC journalist.  Particularly interesting are the extracts from the memoirs of Fey von Hassell, German mother separated from her young children and imprisoned in various locations because of her husband's anti-Nazi political views. 

The reader meets these participants through their journals and letters which tell of their concerns about family and friends while also covering their desperate struggle to make progress in the waste-land of 1945 Europe. 

Perhaps some of the most moving sections are those which deal with the discovery of concentration camps, where Allied troops were appalled to find scenes of total suffering and degradation.  After going into the notorious Belsen camp, the British forces compelled the burgermeisters of neighbouring towns to tour the camps and see the burial pit, still half full of bodies.  As I read these chapters I could only feel how dreadful the clear-up job must have been for these ordinary men and women who had to cleanse the rotting camps, while dealing with the profound emotions which they would inevitably have experienced. Very often the humanitarian workers who followed the troops had as traumatic a task as those who fought on the front-line.

Review: Corvus, A Life With Birds - Esther Woolfson

When I bought this beautifully-produced book, Corvus, A Life With Birds, I hadn't fully realised that it would be more about living with birds than watching them.  However, I soon realised that Esther Woolfson has long experience of nurturing and co-habiting with lost and abandoned birds, most of which would have been destined to an early death had it not been for her intervention. 

The story begins simply enough with a set (flock? batch? colony?) of doves, which were kept in a converted coal shed.  But it does not take long before birds are in the house, when Esther's daughter Bec is given a cockatiel, named Bardie, for her 12th birthday.  On the principle that "one bird swiftly begets more", a stream of injured, dying, abandoned, runty fledglings arrives in the house, leading Esther to find out how to raise infant birds.  More birds follow, but it is when an infant rook arrives in a box with the unlikely name Chicken that the story really gets under-way. 

Esther learns that a rook should be fed on a mixture of rodents, chicks and insects, but replaces this diet with minced-beef, eggs and chopped-up nuts on which she soon thrived.  Within weeks she was testing her wings and then flew onto the kitchen table.  A house was constructed for her (never "cage" -  and she was only put in it at night), but Chicken seemed to have a strong building instinct and began to pick at the plaster on the wall beside her house, leaving large holes.  She was with the family constantly, playing with rubber mice, picking at the hems of jeans, flying on to the tops of cupboards and generally possessed of an insatiable curiosity. 

Review: The Last Cigarette - Simon Gray

The Last Cigarette is the third volume of playwright Simon Gray's diaries which he began with The Smoking Diaries.back in 2004.  Its not easy to categorise these books - I've chosen "diaries", for most of the time they record daily events over the course of a year or so, but also slip back to descriptions of events in the past.  The free-form, conversational style gives the reader the impression that he's almost feel that you're listening to Simon Gray while chatting in a bar - which is not surprising because apparently he writes his diaries on an A4 pad, whenever he finds himself alone in a café, bar or hotel room.

The diaries contain a wide range of topics - descriptions of holidays in Greece and Barbados, the period when his play Butley was being produced on Broadway, stories about student days at Cambridge and early girlfriends, and underlying it all, Gray's love/hate relationship with cigarettes and his attempts to stop smoking.  Needless to say, we never actually reach the "last cigarette" by the end of the book, despite countless struggles during earlier chapters. 

Review: My Father's Country - Wibke Bruhns

In My Father's Country, subtitled "The Story of a German Family", Wibke Bruhns takes us through German history from the start of the 20th century to the Second World War, as it affected her family.  She begins with her grandparents and ends just after the trial and execution of her father, "HG" Klamroth for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

The family were wealthy, owning several businesses and being heavily involved in international trade.  They were steeped in German nationalism, being conservative in the extreme and highly respectful of the military and its leaders.  Wibke Bruhns writes that her father HG, had to absorb "three cheers for Kaiser and Fatherland with his mother's milk".