1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall - Softcover

Peter Millar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906413479 ISBN 13: 9781906413477

Publisher: ARCADIA BOOKS, 2009

Synopsis

'My wife sat at home in floods of tears, in front of the television, the uncomprehending toddlers tugging at her, asking 'Mummy, what's wrong?'. If they'd only known: I was hanging out on a busy street corner trying to coax three 19-year-old waitresses into a taxi to take them to the biggest party the world had seen in four decades. All over the planet people were celebrating but the predominant thing on my mind was, 'Damn, all this is happening 24 hours too early'. The night was November 9th 1989, and the Berlin Wall was coming down. For perhaps the first time in a century the world was empathising with the Germans. Nobody had known it would. Least of all the intelligence agencies of the West, caught napping on the eve of their greatest 'victory' as they would be again on September 9th, 2001, their greatest embarrassment. But then not even the men who gave the orders in east Berlin knew it would happen. Not even as they gave them. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the triumphant vindication of the 'cock-up' theory of history.

About this title

Review:

The best read is the irreverent and engaging account by Peter Millar, who writes for the Sunday Times among other papers. Fastidious readers who expect reporters to be a mere lens on events will be shocked at the amount of personal detail, including the sexual antics and drinking habits of his colleagues in what now seems a Juvenalian age of dissolute British journalism. He mentions his long-suffering wife and children rather too often, but the result is full of insights and on occasion delightfully funny. The author has a knack for befriending interesting people and tracking down important ones. He weaves their words with his clear-eyed reporting of events into a compelling narrative about the end of the cruel but bungling East German regime. --The Economist, November 5, 2009

'The most entertaining read is Peter Millar's The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall, a witty, wry, elegiac account of his time as a Reuters and Sunday Times correspondent in Berlin throughout most of the 1980s' --The Spectator, 5 December 2009

'1989 The Berlin Wall is part autobiography, part history primer and part Fleet Street gossip column ... Millar cast aside the old chestnuts and set about reporting on the reality of life under communism. In bare Stalinist apartments, at hollow party events and over cool glasses of Volker the gravedigger-cum-hippie, the Stasi seductress "Helga the Honeypot", Kurtl the accordion player whose father had been killed at Stalingrad, and the petty smuggler Manne who has been separated from his parents by the Wall ... Energetic and passionate ...' --Sunday Times, 13 December 2009

About the Author:

Peter Millar is a British journalist, critic and author, primarily known for his reporting of the latter days of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall for The Sunday Times. He has published non-fiction, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, and fiction, Stealing Thunder and Bleak Midwinter. He is the translator of several German language titles into English, including the best-selling The White Masai (Arcadia) by Corinne Hofmann and A Deal With the Devil by Martin Suter (Arcadia), recently shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie International Dagger. Author's Website: http://www.petermillar.eu

About this edition

• Publisher: ARCADIA BOOKS
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1906413479
• ISBN 13: 9781906413477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300