The Berlin Wall - Frederick Taylor

I've had my eye on this for a while, it looked just the thing to sketch in my knowledge of the post-Airlift period in Berlin and take me up to the events in 1989 that I remember so vividly.  It did everything I wanted, Taylor's steady hand and light touch rattled through events at an enthralling pace.

The book explained the workings of some things that I partly knew but didn't quite understand - how the West Berlin U-Bahn managed to go through East Berlin.  There were things that were completely new to me - particularly the gruesome-sounding (walled) leaders compound in the countryside.  

Overall here was a clear description of an 'ordinary terror' that happened within my own memory. A city walled in like an anchorite, with limited access to the means to survive. The idea was, one supposes, that Berlin would become too costly or too unimportant for the West to maintain, leading to the eventual victory of the East.  That didn't happen of course, so we were left with a cruel and fascinating stalemate for twenty eight long years.

The Berlin Wall will become a footnote in history, one of the oddities that teachers will regale the students of the future with.  If those students of the future have a desire to learn more about this bizarre and deadly construction, they could do far worse than reading this meticulously researched volume with useful maps and a set of photos that offer more than the usual stock images.