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Title: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany by Joel Agee ISBN: 0-226-01050-3 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Wow!.....This book brought back memories....
Comment: I too have been urged by friends to write a book about my youth. In 1981, at the age of 18, I decided to reunite with my father and immigrated from the USA to the DDR. I was later expelled in 1986 for political reasons and lived elsewhere in Europe until my return in 1991 following the Fall of The Berlin Wall. I remained there until April of 2000 at which time I returned to the USA.
This book brought back some memories despite the difference in time. (The Author went to the DDR in 1948 at the age of 8. I went to the DDR in 1981 at the age of 18) I had no idea that there had been any other Americans that shared an even remotely similar story and Joel Agee does a great job of telling his story with far more emotion and prose than I ever could.
The book is a wonderful insight into life in a country that no longer exists...from the view point of an American child/young adult. I especially recommend it to anyone who has grown-up or lived in a country where they felt they did not belong. In my opinion, Agee entered the DDR in its infancy and left just as its darkest period began. I entered The DDR at the height of the Reagan Era and witnessed its collapse from within. Two historic phases. I only wish that both of us could have witnessed more.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Book that touches You
Comment: I read Joel Agee's book "Twelve Years. An American Boyhood in East Germany" in German and in English and tried very hard to get a used copy of his first american edition - without any success. Finally, he is back again with a new edition, and allthough my english is not as good as it should be, I just want to write down some words abaout this book. For me who always lived in Western Germany it is one of the most interesting books about the communist part of Germany, the GDR (in german it's DDR). It was not meant to be a political book, but it has become one anyhow. The reader is not only enabled to follow a very private story of growing up as a boy (including all the problems most man - since they have been boys - know and prefer not to talk about it), but to understand how culture and everyday life had been transformed by the communist ideology in a way that could be critizised only by children: some simply laughed about it and learned, that even only to laugh could have negative consequences. And getting some idea of how adults did discuss the political penetration of everyday life makes you feel glad to be grown up in a non communist state - but still you can understand that this adults they had their living like others had, and that they were fathers and mothers having everyday problems like others had. This book indeed touched and pleased me. It is a marvellous written autobiographical kind of literature. If you'll read it, it will take a part of your heart and your intellect to. You'll have to love it.
Rating: 5
Summary: An American Manhood
Comment: I'm delighted to see that Joel Agee's memoir is now available again, and I look forward, with pleasure, to re-reading it. In beautiful prose, Agee not only reveals the pains and pleasures of his growing up (it could be anywhere), but gives us a portrait, from an unusual angle, of life in the newly formed German Democratic Republic, i.e.,communist East Germany, during the period 1948-1960. The historian will find the book of particular interest, but so will anyone else who enjoys entering the unsual world of a sensitive young man with a terrific eye for detail, and who is frank about his inner life.
Agee returned to the U.S. just as the amazing 60s were about to roll their thunder, and I can't wait to read his follow-up memoir, his "American Manhood" in another world far removed from the East Berlin of his youth.
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Title: Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945-1990, The by Mike Dennis, J.M. Dennis ISBN: 0582245621 Publisher: Pearson Longman Pub. Date: 13 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder ISBN: 1862075808 Publisher: Granta Books Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The File: A Personal History by Timothy Garton Ash, Timothy Garton Ash ISBN: 0679777857 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police by John O. Koehler ISBN: 0813337445 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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