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

Millar, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910050261 ISBN 13: 9781910050262

Publisher: Arcadia Books Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

It was an event that changed history and Peter Millar was in the middle of it. For over a decade Millar had been living in East Berlin, as well as Warsaw and Moscow, and in this engaging memoir we follow him to the heart of Cold War Europe. We relive the night that it all disintegrated, and its curious domino-like effect on Eastern Europe. We see Peter as he opens his Stasi file and discovers which of his friends had - or hadn't - been spying on him. A compelling, amazingly insightful, and entertaining read, this book brings Peter Millar's characteristic wit and insight to one of the most significant moments in history. Peter Millar has worked for Reuters, the Telegraph Group and the Sunday Times as a foreign correspondent. For the latter he covered the Fall of the Berlin Wall and was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Millar is a journalist who has worked for the Daily Telegraph, Reuters, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and as a popular fiction critic for the Times. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is the author of All Gone to Look for America and Bleak Midwinter.

Review

'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 * '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 * '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 *

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcadia Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1910050261
• ISBN 13: 9781910050262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 233