It's a gripping memoir and a history of the building in Berlin to which Kirsty Bell had fled after a divorce. It's an emotional ride of the undercurrents of all our lives that in the way of unercurrents keep shifting shape. It's fascinating both as an intensely personal and deep historical story.
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 Berlin’s 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 city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking…
Having lost my fighter pilot father, this book resonated with me in a special way. A moving tribute to the author's grandfather he never knew, it is a poetic tribute to all the fliers lost in WW2, much in the way that the trenches were the source of poetry in WW1.
In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with the 83rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a night raid on Münster and disappeared.
Widespread aerial bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second.
The book introduced me to a new world of plants, their intelligence and preferences. They, too, are thinking and feeling beings! For example, when a bee settles on a flower, the plant decides whether to give it lots or little honey depending on that particula bee. I am sure the book will also change your attitude to all the plant life around us.
"teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights" Observer
A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger.
Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing - us included. Many are so ingenious that they…
When Gabrielle Robinson found her grandfather’s diaries, she made two discoveries: she was overwhelmed by the details of her beloved Api struggling to survive during the fall of Berlin 1945 and shocked to find out that he had been a Nazi.
Readers will get direct insight into Api’s life as a doctor. He had stayed behind in Berlin even after his family had fled, to help the wounded in nightmarish medical cellars without water or light.
Readers also are invited to reflect on German guilt, political responsibility, and confronting the past. They may be inspired to think about the role of history in their own lives.
