ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Spying for the GDR: a woman’s perspective
JENNY FARRELL welcomes the first memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy
TRIGGER FACTOR: Mass peace demonstration in Bonn against the modernisation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe ie stationing US SS-20 and Pershing II missiles
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
The Shadow in the Shadow
Beatrice Altman-Schevitz, Verlag Das Freie Buch, £23.99
SPY thrillers about and accounts of East-West spying during the cold war abound, always written from a particular Western political standpoint. Autobiographies relating the stories of former “agents for peace” on the other hand are rare. Beatrice Altman-Schevitz’s The Shadow in the Shadow is the only such memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy.
Beatrice’s newly published autobiography tells the extraordinary life-story of two left-wing US-Americans.
Jeffrey, a graduate of the elite Princeton University, was an activist in the free speech movement and very active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Beatrice’s political awakening occurred in Buffalo and the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 and the court case that followed it. “The injustice was too much for me to remain silent,” she writes.
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