Review: Günter Grass’s Local Anaesthetic has been on my night table and on my desk and in my luggage and slipping out of my hands for about a month now. It is finally finished. Don’t hold that lag time against it. Grass’s narrator—a 40-something West Berlin high-school teacher who spends half the book in a dentist’s chair, where a “tooth plumber” shoots him full of numbing drugs and scrapes calcified scum from the backside of his smile—spins an alternately hallucinogenic, veiled, misdirecting and foully... Read more

Review: Es una auténtica delicia, creo que no hay una palabra mejor para describirlo.
Al principio pensé que iba a hablar demasiado para mi gusto de flores y plantas, no es que no me gusten pero sólo sé distinguir las más conocidas y temía perderme, pero no. "Elizabeth y su jardín alemán" es eso pero es mucho más que eso. Lo que más me ha encandilado es la fina ironía y el sentido del humor de la autora y... ¡Me he sentido tan identificada con algunas de sus reflexiones! que no puedo dejar de recomen... Read more

Review: Just how tenable is a modern state--a Great Power, in fact--if it refuses to conform to modern nationhood? Per Christopher Clark, the answer would would be "surprisingly so," though with roughly a trillion caveats. In a quick-reading narrative style that belies the mind-boggling mastery of a huge sweep of historical epochs and characters, Clark charts the uneasy path that early progenitors of the Prussian dynastic line took through the political and cultural battles of modernizing, maturing Euro... Read more

Review: Absolutely shocking. People have not changed at all and once again history is repeating itself.
Hate and suffering are upon us because of ignorance and indifference. Read more

Review: I have long postponed reading Christopher Isherwood for some odd reason or another. I think it was because I never really discovered that there was a lot of attention given to them in book discussions over the years. Nevertheless, I have learned what I was missing.
I have always been fascinated by Berlin, mostly because it has always seemed a bit out of the ordinary. Germans themselves are an odd combination of pure rigor and gaiety, something which doesn't make much sense until you experienc... Read more