Brilliant.” —National Geographic Traveler
“Berlin is the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read.... It's a work of imagination, reflection, reverence, perplexity, and criticism that reveals as much about the author's precocious mind as it does about the city he adores.... Stunningly beautiful writing.” —The Washington Post
“MacLean reveals his prowess as a storyteller, flawlessly weaving together history, facts, and folklore.... [He] brings this 'city of fragments and ghosts,' with its fractured and volatile past, to life.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Sprawling, experimental, and in certain moments, ungainly but also deeply enthralling, much like the city itself.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segmentsa history that is not all gloom and doom. ” —Kirkus Reviews
“A wonderfully enjoyable, poetic and instructive tour through the history of this fascinating and changing city. A book that magnificently combines real history and pure reading pleasure. Not just for those interested in Germany, but for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.” —Stephane Kirkland, author of Paris Reborn
“Grandly ambitious . . . splendid. [T]his book is a wonderful achievement, not justly to be summarized in the few hundred words of a review, but hauntingly representing, as in a tangled dream, six hundred years of history.” —The Telegraph (UK)
“MacLean's wonderfully knowledgable overview of the city's history helps explain the place's enduring fascination.” —The Guardian (UK)
“Vivid, imaginative . . . brilliant. What makes MacLean's history of Berlin stand out is that this is an intensely human document, a rich tapestry spanning five centuries and woven together through intimate portraits of twenty-one of its former inhabitants that collectively reveal the narrative of the city . . . Their stories are wholly engaging, written with the flair of a novelist.” —The Observer (UK)
“Entertaining and ambitious . . . MacLean has written a great book about Berliners.” —New Statesman (UK)
“superb...[MacLean] has a knack of approaching his subjects obliquely, catching them unawares....original and well-researched. MacLean is a highly visual writer, and his dialogue is crisp and believable. [He] deserves to win all the prizes going.” —The Tablet (UK)
“Inventive, exhaustive, and energetic. Berlin is . . . a human story. MacLean tells it with a wonder, a sadness, and a compassion.” —Herald Scotland
“[MacLean] writes with the lyricism of Bruce Chatwin and the traveller's eye of Marco Polo. He engages with his readers as if he is talking to an intelligent friend. Read this book if you already know Berlin, or will do one day.” —The Oldie (UK)
“I loved it. It is such a beautiful way of understanding history, its stories are so vivaciously told, it is so heartfelt, so intelligent, and so talkative a book. So many of the characters do end up talking to each other, and the author is eavesdropping. It paints the past and the present, portrays Berlin as a portrait of someone you love. It is beautiful.” —Jay Griffiths, author ofWild, Pip Pip, and Kith
★ 08/04/2014
The admiration and love travel writer and filmmaker MacLean (Stalin’s Nose) has for Berlin is evident throughout this history of the city, which begins in the 17th century. His careful arrangement of detail and far-reaching scope make for a perfect description of e one of Europe’s most enigmatic and controversial cities. When Berlin was just a small town, isolated from the busier marketplaces in what is now Germany, it was a city “incapable of tenderness,” one that “only ran fiery hot or bitter cold.” As he moves through the years, depicting the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the establishment of the Prussian state, the narrative’s tempo picks up. MacLean visits new eras in each successive chapter (assigning all of them with a theme and representative figure), engulfing readers in the atmosphere of the city and the lives of Berliners both ordinary and noteworthy. It’s when he explores the minds of Berlin’s modern masters—particularly Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie, with whom the author made films —that MacLean reveals his prowess as a storyteller, flawlessly weaving together history, facts, and folklore. Moreover, MacLean’s treatment of Berlin under The Third Reich and during the Cold War perfectly reflects the tension of the city’s own attempts at remembrance. MacLean brings this “city of fragments and ghosts,” with its fractured and volatile past, to life. Photos. (Oct.)
2014-08-26
Berlin's greatest hits, from the age of the medieval troubadour to David Bowie's "Heroes." Canadian travel writer MacLean (Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, 2011, etc.) walks through Berlin's fluctuating, unstable past and plucks personalities that best represent the spirit of the city, good or evil, reaching all the way back to the 15th century. He seeks "to map this place, divided as it is between past and present, conformity and rebellion, the visible and the invisible." Berlin, writes the author, "was never an ethnic German city," but it always attracted newcomers; during times of plague, there were influxes of Franks, Flemings, Rhinelanders and Danes, as well as Jews—the oldest Jewish gravestone is from 1244. The accession of the austerely militaristic Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty transformed Berlin from a garrison to a great and beautiful city under the enlightened despot Frederick the Great, who was able to lure Voltaire there to live and work in 1750. MacLean's minibiographies underscore the highly idiosyncratic temperament these characters imparted to the city, and in his own fictionalized, stylized portraits, he offers the artistically brilliant—such as 19th-century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose Altes Museum, among other fantastically neoclassical creations, helped forge a sense of a capital city—as well as the obscure and mythical, such as Silesian factory worker Lilli Neuss, a terrible casualty of the mid-19th-century industrial revolution, whose husband deserted her and took their son, leaving her to an impecunious and miserable fate. The city nurtured plenty of evil, as well—e.g., Fritz Haber, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize and offered effective chemical warfare to the Kaiser in 1915 in the form of chlorine; and Hitler's fanatical mythmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels. A series of imaginative and fanciful narrative segments—a history that is not all gloom and doom.