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Title: The File : A Personal History by Timothy Garton Ash ISBN: 0-679-77785-7 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.89 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Skip it
Comment: While this book provides detail to what everyone knows (the Stasi spied on everyone, including the sixth of the population that worked for it) it offers very little else. Missing is any sense whatsoever of the psychological effects of living in this kind of society or any kind of nuanced understanding of what it has meant to confront these files. Ash gives some small indications of what his own responses were, but as a Westerner who expected to be spied on for his activities, his experience is not very instructive. Garton Ash has many things to be proud of, but this book is not one of them.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Book about a sensitive subject.
Comment: I came across this book by accident just searching for books about East Germany on Amazon.com. On a personal note, I myself immigrated from the USA to the DDR (Home of my fathers family) in 1982 and lived there until 1987 when I was expelled for political reasons. This book told of many things I personally experienced, confirmed many things I had long suspected and informed me of many things I never knew.
It is an excellent, accurate look at a country and a system that have passed into oblivion but left many scars on many people.
Rating: 5
Summary: The kind of book that slaps you in the back of the head.
Comment: I did not read this book for the reasons I ended up enjoying it.
Timothy Garton Ash's delving into his Stasi file is a peek into the madness and organized obsurdity of the East German State. The reader is presented with a wonderful feel for what it was like to live in East Berlin as well as the motives and workings of both Stasi IMs and the Federal Authority which now oversees the administration of the Stasi files.
On another level it is a book about a middle aged man looking back on his Romantic youth, on a man he can not remember well, and sees again through the eyes of the slightly paranoid and slightly inaccurate secret police.
In the end though, this is a frightening book that leaves the reader wondering what are in the secret intelligence files of the Western style democracies.
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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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Title: The Magic Lantern : The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague by Timothy Garton Ash ISBN: 0679740481 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 August, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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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 Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story (Phoenix Fiction Series) by Peter Schneider, Leigh Hafrey ISBN: 0226739414 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany by Joel Agee ISBN: 0226010503 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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