Teaser Tuesday - May 10

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

While a dowry was an accepted part of a young woman's admission to holy orders, advance payment may have bordered on irregular practice. Gradually as the women started to show their worth, local support grew and the carping decreased.

from Fiona Maddocks Hildegard of Bingen The Woman of her Age lots of interesting historical detail but I'm not sure it quite gets to the person of the woman, though as a lot of the documentation is rather sketchy maybe that's not surprising? From the Observer review:

The 12th century anchorite Hildegard of Bingen possessed a clutch of talents which would make even the most eclectic of media-donnas curdle with envy. Writer, visionary, prophet, composer, artist, herbalist, politician, preacher, property owner, upbraider of emperors and favourite of Popes, she could even exorcise demons and heal the sick. She invented her own language, wrote one of the earliest surviving morality plays, established her own convent, terrorised her detractors, and, when she died, was mourned by nuns and reverently biographised by monks.

Maddocks reluctant view - in so far as she passes it on - is that Hildegard is more likely to have encouraged the music rather than written it herself.

Teaser Tuesday - March 18

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Frau Anderson is a woman in her mid-fifties. It is hard to tell what she really looks like because she is wearing makeup to disguise.

From Anna Funder's Stasiland - a series of stories told by those who lived in the former East Germany under surveillance of the Stasi. This is our book group book of the month and I'm beginning to get into it, bureaucracy gone mad (even after unification)...! Here's a review.

Teaser Tuesday - 28 Aug

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

When I noticed the first book missing, I thought I had simply misplaced it, but then I saw the outlines of some feet on the floor in certain patches of the light.
It made me smile.

Getting towards the end of my re-read of Markus Zusak's Book Thief.

Teaser Tuesday - 14th August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

He followed him over to the right and jabbed him once more and opened him up with a punch that reached into his ribs. The right hand that ended him landed on his chin.

Dramatic stuff! A re-read of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief - I teased this a few years ago it is now my book group's book for the month so I'm reading both this and continuing to progress slowly through Dicken's Bleak House!

Institutionalised violence

A quote from Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich - A New History which I featured in yesterdays teaser. He's talking about the reactions to ReichKristallnacht

Hot violence, being driven by passion, was liable to peter out as moods changed; cold bureaucratic violence was a full time career option.

And when it's 'just' concerned with filling forms it is far easier to get collusion by the majority.

Teaser Tuesday - 21st Feb

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The Nazi retailers association, NS-Hago, could clearly exert enormous pressure on, for example, a Jewish porcelain manufacturer which was dependent upon them for retail outlets. District Economic advisers (Gauwirtschaftsführer) monitored Jewish businesses and established a creeping control over those taking them over.

Another teaser fromn Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich - A New History

Teaser Tuesday - 13th Decemeber

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Since one in three Nazi voters were defectors from the conservative camp, it is important to comprehend it. The German National People's Party or DNVP was an unstable coalition of three pre-war parties, with an admixture from the völkisch fringe that sough to make it monomaniacally antisemitic.

From Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich - A New History - a comment from the Daily Telegraph review on the back says:

Burleigh has recreated the mental world in which it became unthinkable not to do the unthinkable, and the depraved became conventional.

So I'm reading with interest - though the first 100 pages (there are 800! of them), on the early Weimar Republic, is pretty heavy going!

The White Ribbon

Last night's film at the Silk Screen was Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon as the linked review puts it:

..a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson..

A tale of Germany just before the First World War where everyone (almost) knew their place, a peaceful rural cummunity where the unsettling and nightmarish is only just below the surface. 143 minutes - but it gripped and carried you along with the narration of one looking back from a perspective of one looking back across even more nightmarish events. It will unsettle you - but do see it! I was reminded of last seasons El Orfanato (the Orphanage) another film placing innocence and threat of the young alongside each other.
Here's the trailer to the White Ribbon:

Maybe you'll feel frustrated at the end of the film but the images and story will live with you!

Teaser Tuesday - 30 March

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

She hoed, but she was hoeing mechanically now. Twice she caught herself about to decapitate a potato.

I'm still with Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (published in the US as 'Every Man Dies Alone') which I teased from two weeks back. This quote comes from a brief (and very welcome) pastoral interlude before the darkness closes in.

Teaser Tuesday - 23 Feb

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

In the end they got a man called Carl with fierce, blue eyes and a mower and a scythe and he pretty well ruined everything, but for a while it hid whole other worlds to play in.
That first visit, after the rain stopped, the long grass was still drenched, we walked right down to the edge of the lake, my socks and shoes soaked through.

Emma Craigie's 'Chocolate Cake with Hitler' the story of the last few days of 12 year old Helga Goebbels life and her gradual realisation of the nightmare which was closing in. This is nearly un-putdownable for me - you know what's going to happen but like a car-crash you don't want to look away. At the moment it is strongly recommended - we shall see if I'm as positive after the second half of the book - my only reservation so far is the recurrence of events which should be amusing but in the context of Hitler's Berlin bunker really, really aren't. e.g.

I did a fantastic dying scene [acting out Snow White's death from poison]

I've only just spotted the Who's Who at the end of the book - very useful for keeping track of the various third reich personalities who flit in and out of Helga's dark vision.