8 weeks in the Conquered City

I'm almost finished with another book, but I realized that I forgot to post about a book I finished a week or so ago called "A Woman in Berlin- Eight Weeks in the Conquered City". This is an anonymous diary written by a young journalist who was in Berlin when the Russians came through at the end of World War II. It is a very detailed account of her experiences with the soldiers, multiple rapes (though the book is not graphic at all), government rations, explosions, gunfire, and a slow return to some semblance of normal life. It's moving. Arnie called it riveting. It made me think a lot about emergency preparation and survival skills. Some of the women hid in crawl spaces to avoid being violated by the Russian soldiers. They lived on "ersatz coffee" and rotten potatoes. Anyway, this isn't an overwhelmingly thoughtful review, but I would recommend it to anyone.

I'm about ten pages away from being done with "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother". This is the Durham Reads Together book for this year (season?). There were about 40 copies of it in the library and in October, there will be a series of lectures and discussions. I like the idea of the wohle town reading the same thing. Oh... like... the newspaper.