Bilgerâs spellbinding memoir hit me powerfully since both our Nazi
grandfathers propelled us on journeys of detection and reckoning.
A staff writer
for the New Yorker, Bilger grew up with German
parents who never talked about their past. However, when a bundle of yellowed
letters arrived at their home, it set Bilger on a breathtaking WWII mystery
tour.
He tracked down people and documents to discover that his grandfather had
been a Nazi party chief in Alsace. He promoted Nazi propaganda and tried to
turn his French pupils into âgood little Germans.â
Yet since he never used his
power to hurt anyone, even protected some in danger of deportation, Bilger sees
him as both guilty and innocent. I faced a similar dilemma, but readers are
challenged to find their own answers.
A New Yorker staff writer, investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in this "unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply moving exploration of morality, family, and war" (Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain)
'The book we need right now' Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war.âŚ
Prepare yourself for a thrilling and idiosyncratic
ride where a pool of water on Bellâs kitchen floor leads her to investigate
Berlinâs âswampyâ past while also trying to make a home
for herself and her sons after a divorce.Â
Bell, an
Anglo-American art critic and author, shows us how to find undercurrents hidden
below the surface in both history and our own lives and how to put the pieces
together in meaningful if fragmented, new patterns.
I agree with the New York
Times review that we are âmysteriously changed - enriched - by the journey she
has invited us to take.â
Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.
The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlinâs Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the cityâs theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but lookingâŚ
I love to read
about animals and Fox and I moved me deeply.
Raven, a young biologist,
lives alone in an isolated cabin. One afternoon, Fox appears mysteriously.
Delighted, she reads to him from The Little Prince, which also features a
fox. After that, Fox joins her each day at the same time.
In the course of their
magical and touching relationship Fox helps Bell feel at home in the world and
appreciate the power of friendship.
Having lived in many countries, I, too, can
feel homeless and would appreciate a Fox by my side and, in a way, through this
book, I do have one.
Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award * 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner * Shortlisted for the John Burroughs Medal * Finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize * Shortlisted for a Reading the West Book Award
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year * 2021 Summer Reading Pick by BUZZFEED * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * KIRKUS * TIME MAGAZINE * GOOD MORNING AMERICA * PEOPLE MAGAZINE * THE WASHINGTON POST
âThe book everyone will be talking about ⌠full of tenderness and understanding.ââThe New YorkâŚ
Finding my grandfatherâs 1945 Berlin
diaries, hidden in my motherâs Vienna apartment, led to a shocking discoveryâmy
beloved Api had been a Nazi.
He wrote them like daily letters to us since we
had fled after losing our apartment in the bombing. Api describes his desperate
work as a doctor in bare cellars without water and light. The dead were stacked
in the rubble outside, and he was at the point of collapse. And yet he
also was a Nazi.
Retracing Apiâs steps sixty years later, I tried to reckon with his
guilt and political responsibility while flooded with memories of his love and
protection in the cold and hungry post-war years.
