A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 5000 unique visitors each month. So far 213 book reviews have been published.
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 In The Perfect Nazi, Martin Davidson joins quite a long line of authors who have written about the Nazi past of their relatives. Perhaps the best book in the genre is The Himmler Brothers, by Katrin Himmler – a difficult book to surpass in view of the noteriety of the author’s grand-uncle and grandfather. But Wibke Bruhns (My Father’s Country) also scores in that her father was an SS officer who was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944. However, Davidson is the commissioning editor for history for the BBC and as the cover tells us, has two degrees from Oxford University so readers presumably may expect something worthwhile in his book.
We are on undramatic ground with The Perfect Nazi. Martin Davidson’s maternal grandfather, Bruno Langbehn was an SS officer but did not rise to great prominence, his only significance perhaps being that he was committed to the Nazi party from its inception. ”Bruno”, as the author refers to him throughout the book, was far from being a glamorous figure, being an artisan dentist by profession, and fairly clueless about his work for the SS. Indeed, the final chapters of the book quote an official document which, the author tells us, provides little more than “a damning portrait of Bruno’s incompetence, his manifest self-importance and his blindness to the futility of the work itself”. It is therefore obvious from the start that this book is not going to provide any great new insights into the operation of the SS or the inner workings of the Nazi Party.
Continue reading Review: The Perfect Nazi – Martin Davidson
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In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland. His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to think about the nature of the Allied bombing campaign over Germany.
Then, being conscious of the poetic legacy of the First World War (Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke etc), he began to wonder why the Second World War did not produce a similar crop of memorable poetry. The result is a book part history, part memoir, part poetic history, but all beautifully written, with a style that befits a teacher of English Literature and a writer for the New York Times Book Review.
The work of Bomber Command in the latter years of Word War II is of course mired in controversy. It seems impossible to speak of what they did with unconditional admiration, despite the fact that the Allies would probably not have won the war without the massive contribution of so many brave young men who flew in Wellingtons and Lancaster to wreak destruction on German industrial centres – and ancient cities. As Winston Churchill said, “the fighters are our salvation, but the bombers are our means of victory”.
So great has been our embarrassment at the scale of the bombing campaign that it is only now that Bomber Command are going to get a memorial in Central London. It takes a book like Bomber County to remind us of the sacrifice made by the airmen who flew dangerous missions over and over again, usually until they eventually failed to return from that fatal run when anti-aircraft fire finally brought them down.
Continue reading Review: Bomber County – Daniel Swift
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 British readers may remember Vitali Vitaliev from his time as Moscow correspondent on David Frost’s 1990s television programme, Saturday Night Clive, and many broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. Vitali was born in the Ukraine, eventually defecting to the West, living in Britain and Australia, and eventually returning to London where he is a successful journalist and writer.
Life as A Literary Device, is partly biographical, partly reportage, and partly miscellaneous musing on life. The book consists of ”seemingly disjointed snippets of real life, they connect by association alone – the random pieces of coloured glass that from themselves into a pattern if viewed through that wonderful children’s toy, the kaleidoscope”.
Early in the book he writes of being influenced by the Russian writer Valentin Kataev, the founder of a literary style which he called “mauvism” – “a literary device consisting of the complete negation of all literary devices”. The term mauvism comes from the French word “mauvais” meaning “bad”, and as Kataev himself wrote, “I am the founder of the latest literary school, the mauvistes, the essence of which is that since everyone nowadays writes very well, you must write badly, as badly as possible, then you will attract attention”.
I am pleased to say that Vitaliev does not write badly – far from it in fact, but he has certainly held to the principle of mauvism in writing a book for the Internet age where ”one website routinely carries links to many others. You open a link in a story that you are reading and it takes you away to another story loosely connected to the first one yet years and/or miles away from it; you then close the link and return to the story you were reading in the first place”.
Continue reading Review: Life as a Literary Device – Vitali Vitaliev
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This is the 200th full-length review I’ve published on A Common Reader. A sort of milestone. . .
I have been subscribing to Granta magazine for quite a few years now and enjoy its quality writing on a vast range of subjects. Its a well-produced journal, not the sort of thing you want to throw away, and I find with most editions that there are one or two articles which still in my mind and make me want to come back to them, often years later. Articles (both fiction and factual) are written by a wide range of writers, including such notables Jonathan Raban, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster, Elaine Showalter and countless others.
Every so often a book comes your way which is satisfying in many different ways. In Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family the writing is excellent and the variety of pieces is sufficiently wide that every one comes as a surprise when you read it. The physicality of the book is pleasing – it feels big and substantial, the typeface and layout work well. Its a book you can dip in and out of and as you read it, you know its going to remain on your shelf to be dipped in and out of for years to come.
Liz Jobey (Associated Editor of Granta) has selected 27 pieces about the family, taken from Granta magazines from 1995 to the present day, all of which, whether fiction of non-fiction, explore the complexity of family relationships and the stresses and strains they generate (and occasional joys).
Continue reading Review – Are We Related? Granta Books
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 Twenty years ago I sat in front of my television watching crowds stream through the Brandenburg Gate as the East German border guards finally gave up the job of trying to prevent people crossing from one side of the Berlin Wall to the other. Anyone with a sense of history could not help but share in the jubilation as a whole nation was set free from the vast prison camp which was East Germany.
Peter Millar, a Sunday Times journalist, was present as these historic events happened around him, and his long years of living in East Germany and Russia have equipped him to write a vibrant and involved account of 1989 and the preceding years leading up to the year of liberation.
I enjoyed reading 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall as much as anything I have read this year. Millar’s eye-witness accounts of his time in Berlin provide a ground-level view of events and serve as a useful counterpoint to the other, more scholarly books on the period which have been recently published such as Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989.
Despite being a “serious” journalist (Foreign Correspondent of the Year, 1989 etc), Millar has adopted an almost Bryson-esque approach to his description of his life, first as a young Reuter’s correspondent and then as a journalist on national newspapers. While his newspaper articles were serious and weighty pieces, there is obviously a humorist in his psyche too. Continue reading Review: 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
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 Ever since Jerome K Jerome had such a phenomenal and long-lasting success with Three Men In A Boat, other travellers have written humorous accounts of their exploits, increasingly so in recent years. There seems to be a vast market for these books, and I enjoy reading them from time to time, usually as light relief from my heavy schedule of more serious books. The range available is vast: there are accounts of going to live in foreign countries (e.g. Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde), taking on ridiculous challenges (e.g. Tony Hawkes, Round Ireland With A Fridge) or just humorous travel journals (e.g. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice).
Chris Stewart’s books are firmly in this category, and I can say they are among the best. Ever since his hugely successful Driving Over Lemons, Chris has charmed us with his light-hearted approach to seemingly impossible challenges. I remember reading “Lemons” during a period of commuting to London in a cold winter and turning away from views across Battersea to Chris’s descriptions of Andalucia, which helped me forget that I was about to join the “I did not know death had undone so many” hoards scurrying over Waterloo Bridge.
Chris Stewart is a little like Michael Palin, in that he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, an ideal travel companion, even on the printed page. John McCarthy interviewed him on Radio 4′s Excess Baggage last week about his new book Three Ways to Capsize a Boat and clearly Chris is a generous-minded man, given to self-deprecation and complete lack of boasting. I had this book on my “to be read pile” at the time, and as I injured my knee last Sunday and was pretty much bed-ridden from Monday to Wednesday, I decided to promote “Three Ways” to the top of the pile and see if Chris could lighten my mood as he did those years ago while on the commuter train.
Continue reading Review: Three Ways to Capsize a Boat – Chris Stewart
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 I never associate jigsaws with summer, mainly because there is just too much to do in the real world outside rather than delving ever-deeper into the intricate detail of those little cardboard shapes. Its different in winter, when afternoons become shorter, and for several days I can get absorbed in assembling the chosen picture, stopping whenever I pass the table to do just a couple more, then staying to do twenty.
I’ve always been slightly ashamed of my delight in this slightly time-wasting activity, and it was good to discover that people as illustrious as Margaret Drabble and her husband Michael Holroyd share my interest. And after reading this fascinating study into all things jigsaw, I can see that there is rather more to them than just an aimless pastime.
But The Pattern in the Carpet is far more than a history of jigsaw puzzles, for Margaret Drabble weaves her main topic around a personal memoir of her childhood and later life, not in a systematic “autobiographical” way, but perhaps more like a conversation with her readers, scattering anecdotes throughout her chapters.
The result is a book which draws the reader on page by page, where he or she will discover fascinating stories about children’s toys, books and puzzles, but will also gain some insight into Margarert Drabble’s life and her writing career.
Margaret Drabble has a mind that takes interest in everything around her. She enjoys puzzles and mysteries in all their forms, and writes of the many children’s games which she played in her home and while staying with “Auntie Phyl”, a rather formidable school-teacher, who has a jigsaw method which had to be followed strictly (find the corners, then the edge pieces, then sort the rest into colours). I like to read that “we were never of that austere school that does not look at the picture on the box” (I know an elderly lady who refuses to look at the box-picture, and it never fails to amaze me that she can do 1000 piece puzzles faster than I can). Continue reading Review: The Pattern in the Carpet – Margaret Drabble
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 When I bought this beautifully-produced book, Corvus, A Life With Birds, I hadn’t fully realised that it would be more about living with birds than watching them. However, I soon realised that Esther Woolfson has long experience of nurturing and co-habiting with lost and abandoned birds, most of which would have been destined to an early death had it not been for her intervention.
The story begins simply enough with a set (flock? batch? colony?) of doves, which were kept in a converted coal shed. But it does not take long before birds are in the house, when Esther’s daughter Bec is given a cockatiel, named Bardie, for her 12th birthday. On the principle that “one bird swiftly begets more”, a stream of injured, dying, abandoned, runty fledglings arrives in the house, leading Esther to find out how to raise infant birds. More birds follow, but it is when an infant rook arrives in a box with the unlikely name Chicken that the story really gets under-way.
Esther learns that a rook should be fed on a mixture of rodents, chicks and insects, but replaces this diet with minced-beef, eggs and chopped-up nuts on which she soon thrived. Within weeks she was testing her wings and then flew onto the kitchen table. A house was constructed for her (never “cage” - and she was only put in it at night), but Chicken seemed to have a strong building instinct and began to pick at the plaster on the wall beside her house, leaving large holes. She was with the family constantly, playing with rubber mice, picking at the hems of jeans, flying on to the tops of cupboards and generally possessed of an insatiable curiosity.
Continue reading Review: Corvus, A Life With Birds – Esther Woolfson
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 This final volume, Coda, in Simon Gray’s diaries will be warmly welcomed by anyone who has followed Gray’s progress from The Smoking Diaries to The Last Cigarette, in which he documented his life in characteristic candid and confessional style.
When Gray died in August 2008, Ian Jack, the then editor of Granta and a close friend of Gray, wrote a moving obituary to him in which he wrote:
Simon started smoking when he was a boy of eight or nine and continued to smoke for more than sixty years, latterly Silk Cut and at his smoking peak at least three packs a day. His ultimate diagnosis and prognosis merely allowed him to carry on with a surer fatalism, no point in stopping now, so far down the motorway past the slip road.
Not that Gray’s diaries are all about smoking – far from it. Gray writes about many topics including his life as a playwright, his holidays in Greece, and his close friendship with Harold Pinter (sadly also deceased late last year). But the battle with smoking is an underlying theme throughout and is a melancholic warning to anyone who feels that smoking is something to do with personal freedom.
Continue reading Review: Coda – Simon Gray
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 In My Father’s Country, subtitled “The Story of a German Family”, Wibke Bruhns takes us through German history from the start of the 20th century to the Second World War, as it affected her family. She begins with her grandparents and ends just after the trial and execution of her father, “HG” Klamroth for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
The family were wealthy, owning several businesses and being heavily involved in international trade. They were steeped in German nationalism, being conservative in the extreme and highly respectful of the military and its leaders. Wibke Bruhns writes that her father HG, had to absorb “three cheers for Kaiser and Fatherland with his mother’s milk”.
HG serves in the army from 1917 and is injured in the shoulder, soon returning to fight in the Baltic nations and eventually journeying up to Kiev and the Ukraine. He experiences and event that causes him mental pain adn guilt for most of his life, when he shoots (in self-defence) a drunk soldier. The defeat of the First World War hits the family hard and like so many Germans they raged at the “stab in the back” delivered by the centre left parties who suddenly requested an armistice (largely to prevent the war coming into the German nation).
Continue reading Review: My Father’s Country – Wibke Bruhns
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