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Title: The Year That Changed the World
Subtitle: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Author: Michael Meyer
Narrator: Ed Sala
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-17-09
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 130 votes
Genres: History, 20th Century
Publisher's Summary:
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Ronald Reagan's famous exhortation when visiting Berlin in 1987 has long been widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The United States won, so this version of history goes, because Ronald Reagan stood firm against the USSR; American resoluteness brought the evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, who was there at the time as a Newsweek bureau chief, begs to differ.
In this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, Meyer shows that American intransigence was only one of many factors that provoked world-shaking change. He draws together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most important events, Meyer contends, occurred secretly, in the heroic stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle - leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who privately realized that his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary of the Communist party. Reporting for Newsweek from the frontlines in Eastern Europe, Meyer spoke to these players and countless others. Alongside their deliberate interventions were also the happenstance and human error of history that are always present when events accelerate to breakneck speed.
Editorial Reviews:
Viewed from a distance, random chaos can take on the semblance of logical patterns, and events that spring from accidents can be portrayed as inevitable. In his book, Michael Meyer reveals "the logic of human messiness" at the center of that history-making year, 1989, when the haphazard unravelling of the communist states was encapsulated by the misunderstanding that prompted the fall of the Berlin Wall: a confused spokesman at a press conference stated that people were free to travel to the West ab sofort immediately.
The great gift of this book is the first-hand familiarity that comes from the authors stint as Newsweeks correspondent in Germany, central Europe, and the Balkans during the years immediately prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We follow him from Budapest to Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, and Moscow as he chases stories and attends off-the-record meetings where he interviews and captures with the economical pen of a portraitist such key crucial players as Vaclav Havel and unlikeable Lech Walesa. There is an unforgettable portrayal of Ceausescu, each detail illuminating the psychology of a dictator. After an hours wait, Ceausescu shuffles in, wearing woven plastic shoes and a baggy grey suit, and offered a moist weak palm. His people feared this man as Satan. They referred to him simply as He.
The titles boast of untold story is partially justified by the unprecedented attention given to the quiet contributions of Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth and his secret cooperation with the West German authorities in opening the Austrian/Hungarian border in the summer of 1989, allowing hundreds of East Germans to take the long route out.
