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Many of the plays written by Indigenous playwrights are usually dark and critical. This play is a little different. It’s an unabashed comedy celebrating the Indigenous sense of humour. Essentially, the play is about two German entrepreneurs who travel to a First Nations community planning to build the world’s largest Native theme park, called Ojibway world. The play deals with stereotypes and the global marketing of culture. 

This isn’t an easy read, but it’s an important one. A diary by an anonymous female journalist trapped in Berlin as bombs fall and the Red Army closes in, it describes in graphic detail her struggle for survival between April and June 1945. Berlin’s women had difficult choices to make in this period, and the author records unflinchingly her decision to choose the ‘protection’ of one Russian soldier over repeated rape by multiple others. It is one of the few books that tell us about war from the perspective of civilian women, immersing us in their world and recording the impact of political leaders’ delusions of grandeur and glory on individual lives. I didn’t find this an easy book to pick up, but found it even harder to put down.

I greatly admire how this book subverts the traditional form of biography in a way that perfectly suits the subject.

Mildred Harnack, the author’s great-great-aunt, was an astoundingly brave young woman from Wisconsin who, starting in the early 1930s, had a central role in Berlin’s homegrown opposition to the Nazis and was eventually beheaded on orders from Hitler.

Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, interviews, and declassified intelligence documents, Donner tells an extraordinarily intimate story that reads like a literary novel and has the pace of a thriller.

How would one navigate Berlin without an invaluable guidebook? There is just so much to see and learn that you require help - and here it is! There’s advice on planning your trip before setting off and then how to get around, where to eat, sleep, shop, and what to see. Discover how to use telephones and public transport and learn where all the best concert venues, theaters, clubs, and activities for children are located. It’s easy to use – having clearly drawn street finder maps, photographs on almost every page, color-coded chapters to each district of Berlin - with information on all the major places of interest with plenty of historical context.

I have long thought that if the “Star Spangled Banner” was ever to be replaced—it shouldn’t be!—the new national anthem should be “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin in 1918 and revised in the years before World War II. I adore how author Churnin gets in all the essentials about Berlin’s path to America, fleeing hate in Russia to find a new home…and falling in love with it.

I was dazzled to learn that Berlin gave all his song royalty money to the Scouts. I think he was a great American; his song makes me love America more, and so does his story. 

Jason Lutes spent decades creating this masterpiece—a graphic novel that brilliantly reconstructs life in Berlin in the years before Hitler became Chancellor. The characters are fully dimensional, a diverse and compelling collection of individuals, reeling from World War I, struggling to face the fall of Weimar and the cold hands of fascism tightening around their necks. This is a perfect melding of art, narrative, and political urgency that speaks eloquently to our perilous age.

Before ‘uplit’ was even invented, there was DBC Pierre. His fiction has been described as a ‘joyful celebration of the human spirit’ and that is none more evident than in his protagonist in Lights Out, Gabriele Brockwell, a twenty-something narcissistic pleasure seeker optimistically stumbling through life before ultimately finding his place in it. A book that leaves you with the thought that optimism is the key to turning bad luck into good.

Lawton and I both write novels about the post-WWII period and have had great conversations on author panels. The protagonist of Then We Take Berlin, Joe Wilderness, is something of a picaresque anti-hero. His mother died in a bomb attack, his abusive father basically abandoned him, so Joe survives as a petty thief, works the black market, and reads everything in his local library. Called up for National Service, his total lack of respect for rules lands him in military prison—and MI6 offers him a way out. So begins his career as a spy. Set in two timeframes, I particularly enjoyed Lawton’s portrayal of Wilderness’s chameleon-like powers of adaptation and his struggle to reconcile his private life, married to his boss’s daughter, and his undercover persona as a spy.

This is a rare book on the Berlin Airlift written by an airman for airmen and is about the massive logistical undertaking that the Airlift represented rather than the political crisis that led to it, the negotiations to end it, the impact on the people of Berlin or the balance of power in Europe that resulted.

It is organized around topics such as “organization and operations,” “bases,” “men and machines,” “air traffic control” and so on. It provides a wealth of statistics in 10 appendices that include the units employed, the casualties, the monthly tonnages, and individual aircraft performances. It is a treasure trove of useful details for an author (like me) who wants to depict the Airlift realistically. 

This author offers a well-crafted history of daily life inside the Reich, a fascinating exploration of the German capital as the Nazi movement brought its citizens to their knees. Extensively researched and documented, Moorhouse vividly portrays the daily oppression and challenges faced on all societal fronts. This well-crafted study enmeshes the reader in life under totalitarian rule.