Berlin by Rory MacLean - ISBN: 9781780224589
Paperback
Twenty-one lives reveal Berlin’s tumultuous, powerful, and creative history.

Berlin

Imagine a City

$33.21

  • Paperback

    432 pages

  • Release Date

    1 February 2016

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Summary

The first single-volume biography of Berlin, one of the world’s great cities - told via twenty-one portraits, from medieval times to the twenty-first century.

A city devastated by Allied bombs, divided by a Wall, then reunited and reborn, Berlin today resonates with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful and fallen so low. And few other cities have been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781780224589
ISBN-10:1780224583
Author:Rory MacLean
Publisher:Orion Publishing Co
Imprint:Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:432
Release Date:1 February 2016
Weight:320g
Dimensions:196mm x 128mm x 28mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

This grandly ambitious work has a noble intention: to recreate through art and imagination the whole historic presence of a great capital, from its beginnings to its present day … MacLean’s book is a wonderful achievement, not justly to be summarised in the few hundred words of a review, but hauntingly representing, as in a tangled dream, 600 years of history - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

A brilliant new history of Berlin … What makes MacLean’s history of Berlin stand out is that this is an intensely human document, a rich tapestry spanning five centuries and woven together through intimate portraits of 21 of its former inhabitants … This is how I love history to be told, through the people who live it - OBSERVER

The best history is biography: the story of the people who shaped and destroyed, entertained, beautified and murdered. Rory MacLean imagines Berlin through its inhabitants - THE TIMES

Rory MacLean offers an entirely beguiling and original portrait of Berlin … a perfect companion for those about to discover, or attempting to make sense of, their own Berlin - INDEPENDENT

About The Author

Rory MacLean

Rory MacLean has known three Berlins: West Berlin, where he made movies with David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, East Berlin, where he researched his first book, STALIN’S NOSE, and now the unified capital. He has twice been shortlisted for the THOMAS COOK TRAVEL BOOK PRIZE and he has been nominated for the INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recipient of a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. He has also written and presented many radio programmes for the BBC. Born in Vancouver and resident for many years in the UK, he divides his time between Berlin, London and Dorset.

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