Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Rilegato

Meyer, Michael

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1847374301 ISBN 13: 9781847374301

Casa editrice: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2009

Riassunto

'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change. More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century but also a crucial refutation of American mythology and a misunderstanding of history that was deliberately employed to lead the United States into some of the intractable conflicts it faces today.

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Recensione:

‘The fall of the wall is the most potent symbol of the end of the Cold War, but 1989 saw dramatic changes in central and Eastern Europe too. Meyer provides a compelling account of events across the continent in what was arguably the most important year of the last century’
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly October issue

‘Meyer uses vivid eyewitness accounts, interviews and secondary sources to recount this riveting history. He has the foreign correspondent’s knack of being in the right place at the right time: Berlin for the wall’s collapse, Prague for the Velvet revolution’
The Irish Times 18/10

‘For Michael Meyer there is a direct line between the US triumphalism at the end of the cold war and George Bush’s belief that you could invade countries in the name of “democracy”. Reagan’s defeat of “the evil empire” easily became Bush’s “war on terror”...The story of 1989 still reads like a miracle, as the people rose up and claimed their countries for themselves’
Guardian 17/10
‘A fresh angle on events leading up to November 9. 1989, arguing for the significance of contributions from various East European politicians, including Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev, and capturing the extent to which events themselves were chaotic and dizzying’
Metro 5/11

‘[Meyer] has the more practised smoothness of a news magazine writer (Meyer was central European bureau chief for Newsweek between 1998 and 1992). His accounts of his experiences as a visiting correspondent in the period immediately before the fall evoke a dulled authoritarianism. He recounts a conversation with three young musicians in an East Berlin bar, who were chafing against their confinement in a small country. When two men sat down on a table close to the musicians, they suddenly changed their demeanour, saying “socialism must be preserved” and “Honecker [the East German Communist party leader] is right’
Financial Times 7/11
‘The former Newsweek correspondent Michael Meyer has spent a lot of time reporting from Eastern Europe, and his brisk first-person narrative works well in bringing the momentous events to life’
Daily Mail 13/11
‘How the Fall of the Wall Shaped Our Lives’
Feature in Look Magazine 9/11

This is a competent and professional account’
Economist 7/11

‘Forty-eight hours after the first Germans clambered stop the wall, I stood through a freezing night with several thousand West Berliners in the no-man’s-land that was Potzdamer Platz at the old heart of pre-war Berlin. The hump of Hitler’s bunker curved softly under the earth a football pitch or so away. An East German construction crew was knocking a new passage through the Wall, and it was tough going. A crane stained to lift a 12ft-high slab. Finally, it gave way and was hoisted above the crowds, twisting slowly, as if from a gibbet’
‘Michael Meyer, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989, reflects on what might have been’
Irish Examiner 7/11
‘[Meyer] also looks more broadly around other parts of central Europe, particularly Hungary, whose decision in March 1989 to open its border with Austria encouraged the exodus of refuges from East Germany, which weeks later resulted in the fall of the Wall. His book is no worse for being more traditional history. People power played a part in the 1989 revolutions, but ultimately leaders took the decisions which brought about the collapse of communism’
Spectator 5/12

L'autore:

Michael Meyer is currently Director of Communications for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Between 1988 and 1992,he was Newsweeks Bureau Chief for Germany, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He has worked at the Washington Post and has won a numberof international journalism awards. He is the author of Alexander Compex. He lives in New York.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1847374301
• ISBN 13: 9781847374301
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272