This is the sort of book that reminds you why the Confederacy lost. Women were more interested in their own fashion, etc., than in the travails of their newfound republic. The feeble introduction fails to highlight this fact.

I am a student of history and am doing my final thesis on southern woman during the civil war. Thus, I have had to wade through numerous diaries to find what I am looking for. I was very impressed with this diary because it was well written and very intersting to read. I feel that it has something for everyone. It touches your heart strings with it's descriptors and the evident feeling behind them and it also gives awsome accounts of battles though letters and second-hand information. If you are in anyway interested in the civil war, then this is a wonderful book to start your journey with.

Belinda J. Davis examines the German home front during World War I by describing the severe food crisis affecting "a broadening population of Germans" (2) from the beginning of the war, particularly the lower and working classes in Berlin. Davis asserts that "women of lesser means" (3) were hardest hit by food scarcity, inflation and governmental ineptitude in dealing with the ever-growing food crisis in Germany's capital city, and that these careworn women came to symbolize the hardships of all Germans facing starvation, price-fixing, and hoarding by producers. "Gender plays a central role in this account of the war," Davis announces (3), and goes on to depict the new political role women came to play by way of street riots, public protests and entrance in to the work force (most notably munitions work.) She demands that "we must acknowledge the changes brought about" by the protests of women of lesser means during the course of the Great War that eventually led to revolution in 1918 and the collapse of the German war effort. (234) These important changes were in the form of a "just distribution of material goods and political power," (236) with which Berliners struggled for years to come. Although Davis' innovative focus on lower class women consumers from 1914 to 1918 is a provocative one, Home Fires Burning suffers from a number of organizational and conceptual problems that ultimately undermine the book's success.
Several problematic evidentiary questions are apparent in Home Fires Burning. Davis uses Berlin as a microcosm for all German cities in describing the catastrophic food shortages, such as bread, potatoes and butter, and distribution problems. Yet, despite her introduction in which she discusses Germany as a whole and a willingness to extrapolate from Berlin's example for all of Germany, Davis goes on to say that Berlin was "clearly unique within the empire." (17) This contradiction raises a question of how representative Berlin is for the entire nation, particularly since Davis engages in very little discussion of other German cities. Furthermore, she concludes that Berlin policemen observing rioting women in the streets gradually began to sympathize with those "of lesser means," and eventually colored their reports to superiors with subtle calls for actions and relief. (99-103) If it is true, however, that these police officers manipulated their statements for their own benefit, it casts doubt as to the credibility and reliability of the value of these records (upon which Davis relies heavily) as evidence-something she seems not to have questioned throughout the book.
Davis also commits the "fallacy of insidious generalization," most notably in her lack of quantification. Although Davis does provide several tables in this study and briefly discusses caloric intake quantitatively, she repeatedly generalizes in her narrative and for the most part avoids numbers. In a lengthy discussion of special consumer privileges granted to soldiers' wives, for example, her analysis rests on impressionistic accounts of police reports that echo resentments of those not afforded these benefits (primarily extra food coupons and rent protection.) She provides no analysis of what this allowance meant to soldiers' wives in real terms-was it significant or meaningful? Did those not receiving this benefit have a legitimate gripe, or were their protests based on misperceptions? Throughout this study, the reader gets little sense of the scale of the home front crisis due to a sense of imprecision. Davis employs frequent generalizations (such as "many", "all," or "none") and a persistent, sweeping use of jargon to summarize broad concepts with little or no description.
Hyperbole characterizes Davis' prose. She claims broadly that women were an "inner enemy" of society, while "particular circumstances of the war [resulted in] ...the vilification of femaleness." (45) Nowhere does she prove that all women were vilified for being females-or for any other reason. Additionally, Davis asserts that the "primacy of gender" led to working males receiving more food subsidization, and labels this "a social tragedy." Describing class and gender issues as tragic while a horrific war raged for four years is an inappropriate exaggeration, ultimately weakens the credibility of her entire argument, and should have been avoided.
Throughout her account of World War I food and politics, Davis reveals her own aesthetic of what good government should be, then and now: interventionist. She uses prose to dehumanize her descriptions of government agencies and workers responsible for providing aid, too often referring to them coldly as "the state," "the commission," or "high-level authorities." (67, 91) This literary device creates an impression of an unsympathetic, faceless bureaucracy plodding along, rather than an overwhelmed group of individuals struggling to solve and react to unprecedented domestic problems. Her choice of words when referring to government actions is telling: official actions to solve food crises were "partial, grudging," (109, while their efforts were "hapless." (115) The free market had a "degrading effect" on the German economy, and was inappropriate, (124) while Germans had "to serve, rather than be served" (11) by the state-a condition Davis evidently laments.
Davis uses a grinding, repetitive narrative to hammer home her theme that only a total governmental intervention in the economy and food distribution system of Imperial Germany, especially in Berlin, could have-and should have-saved thousands from starvation and potentially have warded off revolution by the end of the war. She employs repeated examples of limited efforts by imperial agencies to solve the various food and price emergencies to support her claim that partial solutions failed, such as ill-conceived rent controls (210), price ceilings for milk (162) and soup kitchens (156). Thus only radical measures such as "equalized distribution" of food resources (180) and "total control" of the economy by government officials (115) could bring about the "just distribution of material goods and political power," (236) especially for lower class women short of revolution. Unfortunately, Davis' argument is largely unpersuasive, given her failure to provide evidence that such extreme measures would have proven any more effective in alleviating the suffering of Berliners during the war years than the attempts of the state authorities she repeatedly condemns.

What I loved about this book was how it helps reframe the cultural politics of Weimar and transition Germany. The use of daily life in the theorization of politics and culture is rewarding for Davis, whose use of police reports and bureaucratic documents, buttressed by newspaper and other sources, forces us to rethink the role of the state and working class women in politics.

Because of the lively writing, this book makes good reading for the layperson as well as the academic. It is a fine example of the high quality of historical writing possible when scholars merge contemporary theories of gender and culture with traditional narratives of politics and consumption in wartime Europe.

A memoir by the daughter of Irving Berlin, arguably the best of all American composers and indisputably its premiere songwriter. I read this book hoping that certain nagging mysteries would be solved, especially about Irving Berlin's compositional/creative processes. For who could but wonder how a musically "illiterate" man (he could neither read or write music, hadn't studied harmony, etc.) could create so many timeless masterpieces, so many miracles of musical invention? And who would better be able to answer these questions than the songwriters first born? Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the absence of any insights into these matters. Instead, Ms. Barrett deals with the mundane, the day-to-day stuff. We learn what it's like to be a rich seven year old in New York City instead of how "How Deep Is The Ocean?" came into the world. The book is about her, not about its title character, and that was a disappointment.

This is a beautifully written remembrance of one of the world's greatest songwriters. Berlin fans will welcome the personal insight, warmth and vivid detail that author Barrett provides. A recluse for the last 25 years of his life, Berlin has been an enigma to many, and this book provides many of the intimate details so sorely lacking in other biographies of this American treasure

This guide does not compare well to the other guides that are available. Too bad there is not an Eyewitness guide for Berlin at the moment. You will probable be better off with the Lonely Planet Berlin guide. The maps in the Knopf guide are difficult to use, and the organization is very strange.

One of the few guides I've ever seen where the restaurant information (at least on the eastern part of the city) was reliable -- we could trust it and find really good addresses, where there were few foreigners. Yes maps are small, but it's worth squinting!

The only people who would enjoy this book are those who are convinced that aliens have abucted them and hijacked them to other universes. This book is pure science fiction from start to finish and poorly written fiction. Let's get down to brass tacks:

The evidence that Hitler and Eva Braun died in the Berlin bunker at 3:30 in the afternoon on April 30, 1945 is irrefutible. Both commited suicide. There are multiple eyewitnesses who saw the corpses and who survived to tell the story, either in Russian captivity, on American TV or to dozens of different historians over the years. All saw Eva Braun dead and saw her incinerated in the garden of the Chancellery.

Only the most perverted and uneducated mind could possibly believe for a single milesecond that Eva Braun escaped from the Bunker. Aside from the fact that almost no one escaped alive and got into the American sector at this impossibly late date, what would Eva's motive have been? Hmmm?? She risked her life by traveling to Berlin to die at Hitler's side. He rewarded her loyalty by marrying her the day before their joint suicide. According to the author, Eva then (inexplicably) deserts Hitler and successfully escapes from the Bunker?

Never mind that this is a physical and emotional impossibility for her. Forget that there are no eyewitnesses, either in the Bunker or anyone who saw her alive after 4-30-45. Let's sweep under the carpet that Eva, a devoted family person, never bothered to visit or see her parents again, or her two sisters, Gretl or Ilse.

This book is insulting in its premise, torpid in style and ridiculous in all areas. Avoid it like the plague, it's pure fantasy.

Like a great detective, Thomas explores and thoroughly checks every scrap of evidence before he comes to conclusions. His forensic background only heightens his credibility and serves to convince you even more as you read this intrigueing story. Thomas goes to great lengths to reconstruct what actually happened in those last few weeks in the bunker and afterwards, and is quite convincing in doing so. Was Hitler actually murdered and did things occur the way Thomas surmizes? The world may never know as all living evidence is now gone. This is a most fascinating detective story that will make you think and wonder.

Given the rave reviews this book received I expected rather more of Anna Funder's first work, "Stasiland". The subject matter is certainly loaded with potential, especially given the human trauma associated with the greatest sociological experiment in European history. Funder, an Australian based mostly in Berlin, is clearly fluent enough in German to be able to extract prodigious amounts of detail from the people she interviewed but, in this reviewer's opinion, fails to deliver the knockout punch hoped for.

It all started in 1996, at the height of the rebuilding program, when Funder was working for an overseas television network in Berlin. Having been there at that time myself, I recall vividly how vast the gulf was between what was new and what was to be rebuilt. She approached a woman named Miriam Weber to talk about the fate of her husband who had died at the hands of the Stasi, the East German Secret Police. Miriam's story, like the rest of the people in the book, particularly tragic: the underlying theme being that everyone in East Germany had a story to tell, and hers was a classic example.

The book goes on to tell the individual tales, some more tragic than others, of the lengths the East German Government went to to keep the entire population under surveillance and control the lives of the men, women and children who were East Germany. She interviewed many people, ranging from Stasi operatives with their various slants on the subject, to their victims, many of whom are still literally looking over their shoulders today.

Where the book falls down is in the inappropriate style used by the writer. Whilst I think it entirely appropriate to adopt a sympathetic approach, Funder's often flowery descriptions of the way the fluorescent tube in the kitchen flickers or the way the sunlight catches the smoke from a cigarette is very distracting and, in this reviewer's opinion, self indulgent. I am not interested in her constant references to female sexuality: I've seen enough women from that part of the world to know how beautiful they are, and I don't care what does or does not push her buttons. I'm here for the people's story.

There were times when I thought that the author was working on a screen play for an art movie. It was almost as though the book had been written through a tobacco filter. In fact, the actual content, whilst very moving, could have been condensed into a book half the length. Her slightly over-confident style seemed more geared towards impressing upon the reader that she was a good observer of people and failed miserably. If her mission was to tell the stories of those who suffered, then its success is certainly reduced by her writing style. History as entertainment is not what it's all about. These are real people and there were times when I audibly groaned at such silly distractions.

This subject is a near-bottomless pit and there is a great book out there just waiting to be written. This isn't it.

What makes this book unusual is its sympathetic and nuanced treatment of the victims and perpetrators alike of the totalitarian East German state. Funder provides a vivid account of how vast numbers were forced to live a lie, go mad, flee, or die. The former Stasi members interviewed by Funder truly believed in the rightness of their enterprise: the creation of the socialist utopia. The stories of heroism on the part of ordinary men and women who would not live the lie are amazing, including the story a woman separated from her sick newborn when the Berlin Wall went up overnight. The book chronicles the way that good intentions can go awry. Statist solutions to human misery usually ending up causing yet more of what they would eliminate. That said, the book shows us the darker side of capitalism; the economic instability and inequality that make some East Germans, even now, nostalgic for the secure yet repressive Communist system. Funder is a humane, observant chronicler of the "Wall inside the head" of many Germans today.

Following that dictum, I might point out that, especially in two areas of contemporary concern, Hamann's thought is highly relevant: Oswald Bayer has shown in Autoritaet und Kritik (1991) that Hamann's hermeneutics -- antedating by two centuries Derrida's reflections on intertextuality -- provides the basis for a devastating critique of deconstruction by subverting the French thinker's concept of the "center," and demonstrating where the true center ("Mitte") is to be located. Further, there is presently a lively discussion among scholars of Hamann's critique of Kant's famous essay: "What is Enlightenment"? Berlin's present study would have done more justice to Hamann's thought by discussing such developments as these and others, which were available during his lifetime.

My review is limited to the study of Johann Georg Hamann in the present volume, and the three star rating applies to it alone. Combining Isaiah Berlin's books on Vico, Hamann and Herder under one cover was a felicitous idea of Berlin's editor and literary executor Henry Hardy. The position which these thinkers share: their anti-Cartesianism, their emphasis on history, tradition, language and mythology may now be seen through the considerably different lenses they employ. I feel compelled, however, to register a caveat. When the present Hamann study appeared in book form in 1993, I expressed my reservations about it in a letter to the "New York Review of Books," to which Berlin replied. I lamented the fact that he had ignored modern Hamann scholarship, and had clung to the interpretation of Hamann as an irrationalist, especially that espoused by Rudolf Unger in his 1911 book,"Hamann und die Aufklaerung,"ignoring modern discussions of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Specialists in the field now consider Unger's interpretation outdated, and see Hamann as a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side.

The question of Hamann's relation to the Enlightenment turns on the conception of reason. I have maintained that Hamann employed a mode of reason distinct from that of the rationalistic Enlighteners as well as from that of his friendly adversary,Kant. In order to designate that mode, I adopted a term once used by Kant in referring to Hamann's thought,i.e., "intuitive reason," or, in the original German, "anschauende Vernunft." I accepted the term as an apt one for Hamann's mode of thought, however Kant felt about it. Further, I have demonstrated how it can be linguistically distinguished from the traditional logico-mathematical mode of thought in my book "The Quarrel of Reason with Itself"(1988),and elsewhere. It is one which Berlin rightly sees as akin to Dilthey's "verstehen," which Berlin also rejects. He lists a group of philosophers whose conception of reason matches his own: Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Franz von Brentano, William James, Bertrand Russell and the "Vienna Circle." Most of these thinkers are about as far removed from any kind of "verstehen" as possible. Who then, besides Hamann, may be said to have employed what I have called "intuitive reason"? The prime examples are the great epistemological heirs of Hamann: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe belongs here because of his refusal to analyze the "Urphaenomen." Hence, his anti-Newtonian stance. Nietzsche, especially in "Zarathustra," which I have analyzed closely from the standpoint of intuitive reason in "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition"(1985).

Having stated my reservations concerning Berlin's interpretation of Hamann, I must say, however, that we can be grateful that he has helped mightily to rescue that German philosopher from the obscurity to which he has been unjustly relegated by those who remain under the spell of the strictly rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment. Berlin, in spite of his basic lack of empathy with Hamann, not only recognized his importance, but was always fascinated by him. He was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to "The Hamann News-Letter," which I edited and published in the early 195O's and 196O's. Further, his correspondence with me regarding Hamann over a period of three and a half decades shows an unflagging interest in the man who both attracted and repelled him. In a letter to me of June 25,1972, he wrote: "My passion for Hamann is undiminished." Not too surprisingly, there are certain passages in the present book in which Berlin seems, unwittingly, to move toward a certain degree of empathy,hence to a kind of "verstehen." But such passages are few, and many others are unjustly harsh. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, Berlin's study of Hamann is valuable for introducing the reader, especially the anglophone reader, to the historically important pre-Romantic figure, known as "The Magus of the North," without whom the development of German Romanticism would be unthinkable, and whose insights increasingly bear fruit today, especially in theology and philosophy. As Berlin has said: "Hamann repays study."

Even though I found this book very interesting and finished reading it in a short amount of time, at its completion I found myself disappointed because the book was not the book I thought it was going to be.

This is the kind of statement that I hate others to make-damn the object: book, movie, play, painting etc. because its not what you would like it to be. In this case, however, I feel more than normally justified because the author focuses her writing skills on painting a picture, not so much of her life in a war ravaged city but of how humans regained control over that city.

The difference is important because in her diary entries starting in '46 the author deals almost exclusively with discussions of currency manipulations and political maneuvering-these topics are of extraordinary weight in post war Berlin but I had hoped that she would give me more information about Berlin's physical face.

I wanted to know more about living in a city that was a complete mess-what were the jobs and wages for those jobs and apartments and the resurrection of essential services and a myriad collection of other day to day themes. A reader can't, however, damn a writer for failing to write the book the reader would have liked.
Having said all of this, I believe that Ruth Andreas-Friedrich has written a wonderful book-a book I would recommend to any person with a passing interest in those over-looked pieces of history that are left in the air at the end of a book or a professor's lecture. You read a general history or listen to a lecture series and you're left with questions about the details of what happened, in Berlin's case, when the boombs stopped falling and the Russian troops left. In this case the writer completes much of the picture.

Well as I stated above this book is two different books fused into one and not very brilliantly I might add. The first half of the book describes the last month or so of the Third Reich and the fall of Berlin. Plevier gives a good description of the desperate fighting and insights into why people kept on going to the bitter end. There is also an interesting byline of the last days in the Fuhrers bunker how everyone keeps on obeying him although they all know he's talking out of his arse.
The second half of the book goes on about how Berlin fared up until 1953 under the soviet occupation. It is actually very dry and is primarily concerned with statecraft. If you are interested how the soviets acted this is interesting in a historical way but if you are in there for descriptions about the second world war stick to the first half.

All in all not bad. I picked this book up once at a book sale when I was fourteen and recently read it. I'm not normally a war book person but this was actually quite gripping. Shame about the rather dull second half.

What a pleasure to see the novels of Louise Muehlbach finally being brought back. Muehlbach, the pen name of Clara Mundt, was the daughter of one famous historian, and the wife of another-both professors at the University of Berlin - but in the early 19th century for a woman to become a professional historian was virtually impossible. She therefore turned to writing historical novels, and was one of the best-selling writers in German during the mid-19th century, producing over 100 books, about two-thirds of which were translated into English. This in addition to raising 5 children, managing a large household, and being involved in literary and cultural society! Her work remained popular as late as the first World War, but as with many popular writers - especially women - has never been regarded as "serious" and therefore has not survived. This is regrettable. Her work has, by today's standards, numerous historical errors - probably unavoidable under the circumstances - and she firmly displays opinions and prejudices of her own. On the other hand, most of her novels deal with persons and times only vaguely known to the average English-speaking reader, and offer a fascinating glimpse into strange worlds. And most important, she has the one indispensable gift of the novelist - she is a wonderful storyteller, who keeps the reader turning the pages and wondering what will happen next. Any reader who enjoys historical novels, or who is interested in German history should give her work a try.

This particular item - "Berlin and Sans Souci" - is part of a long series of novels on the Prussian Royal Family. Readers who are not familiar with the time period may find some of it puzzling. The publishers probably selected this volume for reprint due to one of the subplots, which involves a medical student "Lupinus" - who at the moment of his final exam is revealed to be a woman, and who is nevertheless granted her medical degree! This is the kind of side excursion the author always loved, and which adds an erratic charm to her work. Here's hoping the publishers continue to add to the series.