Berlin

An excellent book .. to be read by all. The role of Berlin in the 20th century and how it affected the world beyond as well as local people..stretching into the 21st century. An unmissable book!!

Although I thought I knew a lot about the topic and have visited Berlin many times before and after the fall of the Wall, I still found a lot of interesting information in this book.

I've only visited Berlin once, and that was back in the early eighties. Although we stayed among the bright lights and noise of the west [across the road from a lively Irish bar as I remember it] my mates and I spent a day over the wall in the dark para-military state of east Berlin and the experience of seeing two very different halves of the same, yet divided in so many ways, city in the half light of a cold December has lived with me ever since. Roll-on forty years and I am shortly to return to Berlin, once more in December [naturally], so when Sinclair McKay's "Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century" popped-up as an Amazon daily deal I snapped it up hoping that a little background reading would set me up .Now let me honest upfront this is not the kind of book I normally read, and it's possible, nay highly likely that I misread the blurb, because the focus of McKay's book was not quite what I had expect. Added to that it is quite hard going, McKay's sentences are dense and complex, his paragraphs are lengthy, the structure is rambling and repetitive, and by necessity the tale of Berlin is anything but straightforward with a cast of thousands. That said I persevered because it's a fascinating story and it makes an interesting book. Mackay's account begins in the mid-years of the twentieth century with the rise of the Nazis from the chaos following the first world war, but with much of the book devoted to the war years, particularly the final battle for Berlin, and the initial chaos of the divided city following partition there's little room left for the latter half of the century; and with Mackay finishing with the fall of the wall, shouldn't this just be the start of a new chapter, I was left feeling the story was incomplete, that I'd come in mid-way and hadn't reached the end, and perhaps more importantly questioning whether Berlin really was as MacKay claims "the City That Shaped the Century", or was it more accurately "the City That Was Shaped by the Century"?Recommended if you have an interest in WW2 history but it's not really one for prepping the casual visitor to Berlin.

They’ve got some history, let me tell you.

What a story.What a city.