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Bezig met laden... Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray (Travelers' Tales)door Peter Wortsman
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  MSarki | Sep 25, 2013 |  geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down -- Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue,Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer's Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)943.155History and Geography Europe Germany and central Europe Northeastern Germany Brandenburg and Berlin BerlinLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (1)
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"…my circumcised identity hanging prone between my legs."
Instead of maintaining an interesting and serious stance within his text, Peter Wortsman, the author of this travelogue, cannot help himself but refer in any way he can about his obvious love object, his penis. Because of his repeated exposures of his privates to anyone reading, the book is perhaps unforgettable, but certainly for all the wrong reasons. I cannot quite put my finger on what was the most extreme of the problems here for me except to say his silly idea of being clever and amusing, as well as somebody we might be overly enamored with, reminded me too much of another popular writer I completely despise by the name of David Shields. They have the same problems with delusions of grandeur.
After reading several books written by the great W.G. Sebald I suppose I have been spoiled over what a good travelogue should be. It is not Ghost Dance in Berlin. Not by a long shot. Forget what the blurbs on the book say, this book is for camera-toting bus-riding sissies and not for a gal on foot with a pack on her back and the courage of a Panthera Onca. Sebald comes at you with all the fervor and historical bald truths he can muster. Plus he makes it riveting. This Wortsman guy thinks he's tough because he can fantasize an attack on a moron the likes of Henry Kissinger, sidle up next to him in the German john, and proudly shake his love-club in the face of Henry at the urinal. Wortsman is sickening to me and more than disgusting. How a translator of such work as the great artist Kleist's can stoop so low as this, and with a subject like Berlin so absolutely interesting and relevant to our time. Plus he makes all men look bad, and that really pisses me off. (