The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis
Book
The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of...
history
Even though there’s a huge shortage of young men (they’ve been ‘shipped off’ to the rest of occupied Europe to ‘work’) and women greatly outnumber men, women are divided into categories, or castes. These depend on their age, heritage, reproductive status and physical characteristics, and each category is named after a significant woman in Hitlers life. Rose is a Geli, one of the elite. Young, beautiful, and most importantly, fertile.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and read it far too quickly. It had a black and white, 1950’s movie atmosphere about it, and I could easily picture the people and scenes in my head. It brought to mind The Man in the High Castle with regards to Occupation, and 1984 with regards to feeling as though you’re constantly watched - as well as the people being told how to react, think and live. This was especially evident in Rose’s job: she rewrites classics so that they’re in line with the regimes ideals: so no independent, strong females, and all the male leads are changed to Sturmbannführer (at least!).
The drudgery of everyday life made me think of how I envisaged life in the GDR - as well as only allowing state sanctioned literature, there was only one radio channel in Grand Alliance Britain, with some brave people listening to illegal foreign radio stations, knowing that this could result in extreme punishment.
When Rose goes to Widowland near Oxford (there are a few throughout the country) to find the source of a potential rebellion, she’s shocked to see older women living in abject poverty, only permitted to eat a subsistence diet and work menial jobs. But these women are intelligent, and they’re not happy in their state regulated lives. Between her reading of classic books and meeting these women, Rose begins to see what’s wrong with the world she has been living in, and this dawning realisation is so well described. We see how reading ‘subversive’ classics seems to get under her skin, and how she realises that the treatment of women is wrong in this Grand Alliance.
I could go on and on. I raced through this book, and I loved the ending, which came far too quickly!
Many thanks to Quercus for my copy of this book through NetGalley.
Kafka: The Early Years
Book
How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's...
Letters to His Wife
Book
'There is something absolute about the letters between you & me; ...The letter is a form of...
Los Angeles - Portrait of a City
Book
Rise and sprawl: A pictorial history of the City of Angels From the first known photograph taken in...
Sunwheels and Siegrunen: Wiking, Nordland, Nederland and the Germanic Waffen-SS in Photographs: Volume 1
Book
Western European collaboration with the Germans is still misunderstood, nearly 70 years after the...
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Book
Patrick Suskind's Perfume is a classic novel of death and sensuality in Paris 'In eighteenth-century...
My Dictionary Pro
Education and Entertainment
App
Do you want to learn a foreign language quickly? A unique program for memorizing words will help you...
The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach
Book
Often compared to Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, Caroline of Ansbach is the great queen Britain...
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
Book
Sunday Times Art Book of the Year The astonishing life of Kenneth Clark - the greatest British art...