Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany, 19 Nov 2007
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness, 29 Aug 2007
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.


Personal, and great for it., 03 Jan 2007
Like negative reviews here, I agree that this is a very personal book. However, I do not accept this is a valid criticism - it never claims to be anything else, and it is also warm, vivid, fascinating and well written. These are stories from the past, and (almost) present that collectively provide a rich and absorbing picture. It's not an endlessly footnoted history text...so what?

Disappointing, 30 Oct 2006
The history of the Stasi and their place in the DDR regime could make a fascinating and important book. This, unfortunately, is not that book. Instead, this is the journal of an Australian writer living in eastern Germany as she meets various people with experience of the Stasi. It reads rather like a travel book, and - like most travel writers - Ms Funder believes that she is more interesting than her subject. We are treated to repetitive and pointless accounts of her thoughts, her train and bus journeys, her dreams, and her time spent doing nothing in her almost-empty apartment.

The real content of the book consists of 11 interviews with people connected (as employees or victims) with the Stasi. Except in two cases, Ms Funder makes her interviewees into charicatures (the heroic victim who refused to betray her friend, the raving former propogandist, the swave covert operative in a black BMW) and has often told us how to judge them before she has even met them. Their stories are compelling, but they are constantly interrupted by Ms Funder's descriptions of her own reactions. The repeated interjections of "I'm startled", "I think to myself...", "I imagine..." are tiresome.

I am judging this book harshly because it has been so celebrated elsewhere. In particular, I am disappointed that the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize undermined the value of their prize by awarding it in 2004 to this superficial and journalistic account of an important subject.

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany, 19 Nov 2007
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness, 29 Aug 2007
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.


Personal, and great for it., 03 Jan 2007
Like negative reviews here, I agree that this is a very personal book. However, I do not accept this is a valid criticism - it never claims to be anything else, and it is also warm, vivid, fascinating and well written. These are stories from the past, and (almost) present that collectively provide a rich and absorbing picture. It's not an endlessly footnoted history text...so what?

Disappointing, 30 Oct 2006
The history of the Stasi and their place in the DDR regime could make a fascinating and important book. This, unfortunately, is not that book. Instead, this is the journal of an Australian writer living in eastern Germany as she meets various people with experience of the Stasi. It reads rather like a travel book, and - like most travel writers - Ms Funder believes that she is more interesting than her subject. We are treated to repetitive and pointless accounts of her thoughts, her train and bus journeys, her dreams, and her time spent doing nothing in her almost-empty apartment.

The real content of the book consists of 11 interviews with people connected (as employees or victims) with the Stasi. Except in two cases, Ms Funder makes her interviewees into charicatures (the heroic victim who refused to betray her friend, the raving former propogandist, the swave covert operative in a black BMW) and has often told us how to judge them before she has even met them. Their stories are compelling, but they are constantly interrupted by Ms Funder's descriptions of her own reactions. The repeated interjections of "I'm startled", "I think to myself...", "I imagine..." are tiresome.

I am judging this book harshly because it has been so celebrated elsewhere. In particular, I am disappointed that the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize undermined the value of their prize by awarding it in 2004 to this superficial and journalistic account of an important subject.

A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany, 19 Nov 2007
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness, 29 Aug 2007
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.


Personal, and great for it., 03 Jan 2007
Like negative reviews here, I agree that this is a very personal book. However, I do not accept this is a valid criticism - it never claims to be anything else, and it is also warm, vivid, fascinating and well written. These are stories from the past, and (almost) present that collectively provide a rich and absorbing picture. It's not an endlessly footnoted history text...so what?

Disappointing, 30 Oct 2006
The history of the Stasi and their place in the DDR regime could make a fascinating and important book. This, unfortunately, is not that book. Instead, this is the journal of an Australian writer living in eastern Germany as she meets various people with experience of the Stasi. It reads rather like a travel book, and - like most travel writers - Ms Funder believes that she is more interesting than her subject. We are treated to repetitive and pointless accounts of her thoughts, her train and bus journeys, her dreams, and her time spent doing nothing in her almost-empty apartment.

The real content of the book consists of 11 interviews with people connected (as employees or victims) with the Stasi. Except in two cases, Ms Funder makes her interviewees into charicatures (the heroic victim who refused to betray her friend, the raving former propogandist, the swave covert operative in a black BMW) and has often told us how to judge them before she has even met them. Their stories are compelling, but they are constantly interrupted by Ms Funder's descriptions of her own reactions. The repeated interjections of "I'm startled", "I think to myself...", "I imagine..." are tiresome.

I am judging this book harshly because it has been so celebrated elsewhere. In particular, I am disappointed that the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize undermined the value of their prize by awarding it in 2004 to this superficial and journalistic account of an important subject.

A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Review On Review's, 07 Sep 2008
Of all the books on this subject.This one,is worth 5 stars,and more,all day long.I served in N.I,at the time the book talks about,and even now,I sit with my own thoughts on the things that went on in a time that can only be decribed as dark.And yes the Parachute Regiment did serve there,but its not about them alone,it's for all who took part in it.As one review said.!There was no beating of drums when the lads came home!And the politicians,have no more idea now,than they did then,of what it was all about.They expect you to do the job,with only three wheels on the wagon.
To all that gave the reviews on this book.Thanks,and I give you all 5 stars each,for showing just where it all fits together.

ALong Long War, 29 Aug 2008
If the British public thought Iraq and Afghanistan British Army casualities are bad they should read this book, 1,300+ killed in 27 years.

At last the true story of the men and women of the British Army, Regular and UDR who actually fought the war and the true heroes along with the RUC that brought peace to that troubled part of the UK.

a long long war, 24 Aug 2008
A wonderful book that deserves reading.This is a book by soldiers for soldiers...not the usual politic speak by some retired politician or general. Having completed 5 tours of the Province this book brought back so many memories. Mr. Wharton has captured the humour, the honesty and indeed the sadness of serving in Northern Ireland. I dare any reader not to be moved by the so sad story of the Ware familly. I think the book exposes the incompetence of the senior officers in the early days and the cowardice of politicians whilst showing the extreme professionalism of the British soldier.Cynical?..not me! Note for the author..the Parachute Regiment did serve there! I certainly look forward to the next volume.. A highly recommended book. Bill...Bordon

a long awaited book, 01 Jul 2008
A well researched and informative book. Having served in NI the personal reflections upon events and locations by the contributors brought back many memories of my own involvement in 'the troubles' which I have not thought about for many years. The book is also a testimony to the sacrifices suffered by the casualities of the troubles, the servicemen, servicewomen, their families and of course the people of Northern Ireland, which have long been forgotten by the media and the country. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it was like to be involved in a terrosist war, similar to Iraq, in our back yard.

A Long War, 16 Jun 2008
Thanks, at last a book about the modern day forgotten war. Well put together and with the information coming from the Security Forces on the ground, it gave a true insight as to the real side of the troubles. Reading this has helped me tell my own family what happened, as at the time I was unable to do this. For those not directly involved, and interested, or just forgotten, this is what happened behind the peace talks!!

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany, 19 Nov 2007
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness, 29 Aug 2007
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.


Personal, and great for it., 03 Jan 2007
Like negative reviews here, I agree that this is a very personal book. However, I do not accept this is a valid criticism - it never claims to be anything else, and it is also warm, vivid, fascinating and well written. These are stories from the past, and (almost) present that collectively provide a rich and absorbing picture. It's not an endlessly footnoted history text...so what?

Disappointing, 30 Oct 2006
The history of the Stasi and their place in the DDR regime could make a fascinating and important book. This, unfortunately, is not that book. Instead, this is the journal of an Australian writer living in eastern Germany as she meets various people with experience of the Stasi. It reads rather like a travel book, and - like most travel writers - Ms Funder believes that she is more interesting than her subject. We are treated to repetitive and pointless accounts of her thoughts, her train and bus journeys, her dreams, and her time spent doing nothing in her almost-empty apartment.

The real content of the book consists of 11 interviews with people connected (as employees or victims) with the Stasi. Except in two cases, Ms Funder makes her interviewees into charicatures (the heroic victim who refused to betray her friend, the raving former propogandist, the swave covert operative in a black BMW) and has often told us how to judge them before she has even met them. Their stories are compelling, but they are constantly interrupted by Ms Funder's descriptions of her own reactions. The repeated interjections of "I'm startled", "I think to myself...", "I imagine..." are tiresome.

I am judging this book harshly because it has been so celebrated elsewhere. In particular, I am disappointed that the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize undermined the value of their prize by awarding it in 2004 to this superficial and journalistic account of an important subject.

A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Review On Review's, 07 Sep 2008
Of all the books on this subject.This one,is worth 5 stars,and more,all day long.I served in N.I,at the time the book talks about,and even now,I sit with my own thoughts on the things that went on in a time that can only be decribed as dark.And yes the Parachute Regiment did serve there,but its not about them alone,it's for all who took part in it.As one review said.!There was no beating of drums when the lads came home!And the politicians,have no more idea now,than they did then,of what it was all about.They expect you to do the job,with only three wheels on the wagon.
To all that gave the reviews on this book.Thanks,and I give you all 5 stars each,for showing just where it all fits together.

ALong Long War, 29 Aug 2008
If the British public thought Iraq and Afghanistan British Army casualities are bad they should read this book, 1,300+ killed in 27 years.

At last the true story of the men and women of the British Army, Regular and UDR who actually fought the war and the true heroes along with the RUC that brought peace to that troubled part of the UK.

a long long war, 24 Aug 2008
A wonderful book that deserves reading.This is a book by soldiers for soldiers...not the usual politic speak by some retired politician or general. Having completed 5 tours of the Province this book brought back so many memories. Mr. Wharton has captured the humour, the honesty and indeed the sadness of serving in Northern Ireland. I dare any reader not to be moved by the so sad story of the Ware familly. I think the book exposes the incompetence of the senior officers in the early days and the cowardice of politicians whilst showing the extreme professionalism of the British soldier.Cynical?..not me! Note for the author..the Parachute Regiment did serve there! I certainly look forward to the next volume.. A highly recommended book. Bill...Bordon

a long awaited book, 01 Jul 2008
A well researched and informative book. Having served in NI the personal reflections upon events and locations by the contributors brought back many memories of my own involvement in 'the troubles' which I have not thought about for many years. The book is also a testimony to the sacrifices suffered by the casualities of the troubles, the servicemen, servicewomen, their families and of course the people of Northern Ireland, which have long been forgotten by the media and the country. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it was like to be involved in a terrosist war, similar to Iraq, in our back yard.

A Long War, 16 Jun 2008
Thanks, at last a book about the modern day forgotten war. Well put together and with the information coming from the Security Forces on the ground, it gave a true insight as to the real side of the troubles. Reading this has helped me tell my own family what happened, as at the time I was unable to do this. For those not directly involved, and interested, or just forgotten, this is what happened behind the peace talks!!

Excellent introduction to modern world history, 18 Nov 2008
The author has written several books in this series and this is an interesting and comprehensive introduction to the subject.

This book is pitched at about 'A' level or first year degree level and suitable for the intelligent layman.

Unscrambles the background to modern world events , 19 Sep 2006
Having recently ploughed through a dense 1000 page narrative history of the twentieth century, I had found it hard to see the wood for the trees. I was therefore very pleased to come across this much shorter book which marshalls the key facts much more clearly, with main concepts highlighted for quick reference. Not only does this make the book easy to digest on first reading, but it also greatly aids subsequent review: ideal for exams. How I wish I had been taught history this way at school!

A brilliantly clear and balanced history of the modern world., 26 May 2006
I borrowed this 4th edition(2005) from my local library and was so impressed with it that I intend to buy my own copy of this very accessible and thorough account of modern world history.
The chapter 'The new world order and the war against global terrorism' is a brilliantly clear and balanced summary of the reasons for 9/11 and the messy aftermath of the US/UK attack on Iraq - an explanation that's sadly lacking in most of our dumbed-down news media.
Someone once said that "if you don't understand what's going on in the world you must have been reading the papers". If you want to understand the state of the modern world read this marvellous book.

Clear but doesn't oversimplify ..., 25 Mar 2005
Can I recommend this book too many times?. I don't think so. In my opinion, Lowe's book is a great way to start studying history, or even to learn more if you have already started.

The reasons for that statement are many. "Mastering Modern World History" is clear but doesn't oversimplify the events it talks about. It isn't long, but it gives you a brief summary of the subjects under study and the motivation to investigate more. Also, I would like to point out that the author includes at the end of each chapter some interesting questions that are eerily similar to those a teacher might ask in an exam. If you are a student, don't panic: take advantage of this opportunity :)

"Mastering Modern World History" has many interesting illustrations, and also quite a few useful maps. This third edition includes relatively new historical events, for example the collapse of communism. All the same, I wish I could have the 4th edition, that unfortunately hasn't been published yet, because many relevant things have happened since 1997 and I would like to read about them here. That is the only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5.

To sum up, I think this is a wonderful book, and as such a great gift to yourself and others. Lowe manages to write clearly about subjects that are not simple, and surprisingly enough for those who aren't fond of history books, he also happens to write quite well. What else can I say?. Strongly recommended!.

Belen Alcat

Oustanding, 24 Oct 2001
This book is unique among most books I used for history. The important topics are highlighted, and very often the answer to an essay that may be set in an exam is found within the text e.g. what were the factors behind Mussonlini's rise to power. I used this book almost exclusively and was rewarded with an A in GCSE history so it DOES do the job.

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappointing. However, books like this are often nothing more than expanded magazine articles, a charge that cannot be made here. Recommended.

An insight into East Germany, 19 Nov 2007
I had this book bought for me many months ago, but left it on the shelf until recently.
Having little or no insight into the problems of living in East Germany, I found it very well written, and very engaging. Incidently it is written as non-fiction, but presented in such a narrative way that you would think it was ficticious, and for me reading history is made easier when presented in that format.
It was a grim but interesting journey into life under the control of the 'stasi'. This police state, controlled not only by the state, but also by ordinary people in the street forced into having to 'work' for the state, to control the citizens by some of the most cruel methods, makes for a painful read. It highlights a period before 'The Wall' came down, where Russian communist control continued the deprivations of WW11.

Total Information Awareness, 29 Aug 2007
Anna Funder gives a sharply cut and moving (in)human face to the now defunct German Democratic Republic by interviewing former Stasi members (the top, foreign spies, informants, organizers) and their direct or indirect victims.
In `a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and where anyone who wanted to do anything other than serve the Party, risked persecution or worse', the Stasi's aim was to know everything about everybody with all means, even radiation. As the author poetically states: everybody had `a mirror Nemesis' in a Stasi department. The result was that everyone suspected everyone else and turned into an `internal emigration' for the sheltering of their secret inner lives.
In fact, the Stasi was a formidable organization (one informant for every 6,5 citizens) created in order to defend the government against its own people.
Anna Funder exposes the real Stasi mentality: `The most important thing you have is power" (Chief E. Mielke). Its colossal archives were partly shredded after the fall of the Berlin Wall (15000 sacks) and are being puzzled together. A truly Herculean task.
The author paints a society built on ideological fiction (human nature was a work-in-progress which could be improved by Communism) and on blatant lies (a multi-party democracy, no former Nazis, not responsible for the Holocaust).
But what is left after the collapse? A `Wall in the Head'. The victims are still heavily marked (psychological damage by the terrifying effect of total surveillance) and some Stasi men still hope that the Wall will be built again.

Anna Funder wrote a formidable evocation of life in a communist one party state protected by a wall.
A must read.


Personal, and great for it., 03 Jan 2007
Like negative reviews here, I agree that this is a very personal book. However, I do not accept this is a valid criticism - it never claims to be anything else, and it is also warm, vivid, fascinating and well written. These are stories from the past, and (almost) present that collectively provide a rich and absorbing picture. It's not an endlessly footnoted history text...so what?

Disappointing, 30 Oct 2006
The history of the Stasi and their place in the DDR regime could make a fascinating and important book. This, unfortunately, is not that book. Instead, this is the journal of an Australian writer living in eastern Germany as she meets various people with experience of the Stasi. It reads rather like a travel book, and - like most travel writers - Ms Funder believes that she is more interesting than her subject. We are treated to repetitive and pointless accounts of her thoughts, her train and bus journeys, her dreams, and her time spent doing nothing in her almost-empty apartment.

The real content of the book consists of 11 interviews with people connected (as employees or victims) with the Stasi. Except in two cases, Ms Funder makes her interviewees into charicatures (the heroic victim who refused to betray her friend, the raving former propogandist, the swave covert operative in a black BMW) and has often told us how to judge them before she has even met them. Their stories are compelling, but they are constantly interrupted by Ms Funder's descriptions of her own reactions. The repeated interjections of "I'm startled", "I think to myself...", "I imagine..." are tiresome.

I am judging this book harshly because it has been so celebrated elsewhere. In particular, I am disappointed that the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize undermined the value of their prize by awarding it in 2004 to this superficial and journalistic account of an important subject.

A real eye opener, 13 Jul 2008
A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.




Brilliant book, 07 May 2008
It took courage to write this book and puts Ilan Pappe in the same category as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn lived in a different time and place; however his exposure of an unjust system with a manipulated history had significant impact on changing it.

During the past century a number of milestones have been put in place including the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. These define the standards to which we are expected to adhere (or be judged by) in both peace and war. We cannot compare what was acceptable behaviour in biblical times, ancient empires or the middle ages with a 20th Century ethnic cleansing.

If Pappe's book contributes towards peace in the Middle East through truth and reconciliation, then may history remember him well. He will have achieved what the United Nations and the world's leading superpower failed to do.


How A Racist State Was Formed., 27 Mar 2008
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbours; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers." These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Zionist leaders drew up Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Excellent and essential reading.


The begining of a disaster., 03 Mar 2008
Anyone wishing to understand the roots of the Arab Israeli conflict from an historical perspective must read this book. Pappe presents an alternate course of events that lead up to the creation of the state of Israel and to me at least he seems to have hit on a vein of truth and one that, if a fraction is true, makes for depressing reading. What is really upsetting is that there is little hope of any improvement for the Palestinian people whilst the other versions on the story are presented as the sole historic truth.

The REAL history of the Israeli state, 02 Nov 2007
An excellent and meticulously researched historical text.
The level of cold, calculated brutality and unprovoked savagery used against a largely peaceful peasant population usually offering little or no resistance, a population quite unprepared for a war, who were usually just 'going about their business', is absolutely shocking. As is the clinical pre-planning and ruthless, cold efficiency with which the plan was then carried out. It is no exaggeration to compare what happened with the Nazi push into the Baltic states and Russia in the early 1940's.
The reality of what actually happened during the years 1948-49, compared with the 'official' Israeli version, is astonishing. This is a subject I have had an interest in for some considerable time now, but despite my interest and knowledge of the subject, I was not prepared for the detail. The unnecessary nastiness and inhumanity of the jewish forces, is really hard to come to terms with.
It is also interesting to compare the present day horror and outrage that is expressed at the actions of a 'suicide bomber' with events in early 1948 [when there was no war]. The Stern Gang and Hagana routinely threw bombs into CIVILIAN Palestinian gatherings and blew up houses with all the occupants asleep inside, often killing scores of people, simply to terrorise the population into fleeing Palestine.
I am also deeply ashamed of the role [or non-role] played by the British forces, with one or two notable exceptions, [and the Bevin Government] who, until May 1948, were still officially charged with upholding law and order in Palestine.
Anyone who still buys the notion that the events at Quana, the murder of the UN workers [despite hours of telephone conversations], the very high civilian casualty rates during the 2006 push into Lebanon, the deaths on the beach in Gaza and so on, were all REALLY accidental, should read this book. This particular brand of terror is long established practice by the Israelis.
In fact, it is hard to understand how most of our media and politicians, people who have chosen to make a career informing the rest of us about what goes on, in and around the world, seem remarkably oblivious to this information. Well, there are no excuses now are there ?
I am not sure how anyone could [intelligently] argue that this is 'a piece of anti-zionist fiction' as one of your reviewers suggests, it is far too factually based and closely referenced. It IS a testament to the power of the Israeli lobby and their campaign of distortion and misinformation that we are still presented by most of the media for most of the time the image of Israel as the victim in the Middle East. Now THAT is a piece of PRO-zionist fiction. Excellent, though disturbing book.

Review On Review's, 07 Sep 2008
Of all the books on this subject.This one,is worth 5 stars,and more,all day long.I served in N.I,at the time the book talks about,and even now,I sit with my own thoughts on the things that went on in a time that can only be decribed as dark.And yes the Parachute Regiment did serve there,but its not about them alone,it's for all who took part in it.As one review said.!There was no beating of drums when the lads came home!And the politicians,have no more idea now,than they did then,of what it was all about.They expect you to do the job,with only three wheels on the wagon.
To all that gave the reviews on this book.Thanks,and I give you all 5 stars each,for showing just where it all fits together.

ALong Long War, 29 Aug 2008
If the British public thought Iraq and Afghanistan British Army casualities are bad they should read this book, 1,300+ killed in 27 years.

At last the true story of the men and women of the British Army, Regular and UDR who actually fought the war and the true heroes along with the RUC that brought peace to that troubled part of the UK.

a long long war, 24 Aug 2008
A wonderful book that deserves reading.This is a book by soldiers for soldiers...not the usual politic speak by some retired politician or general. Having completed 5 tours of the Province this book brought back so many memories. Mr. Wharton has captured the humour, the honesty and indeed the sadness of serving in Northern Ireland. I dare any reader not to be moved by the so sad story of the Ware familly. I think the book exposes the incompetence of the senior officers in the early days and the cowardice of politicians whilst showing the extreme professionalism of the British soldier.Cynical?..not me! Note for the author..the Parachute Regiment did serve there! I certainly look forward to the next volume.. A highly recommended book. Bill...Bordon

a long awaited book, 01 Jul 2008
A well researched and informative book. Having served in NI the personal reflections upon events and locations by the contributors brought back many memories of my own involvement in 'the troubles' which I have not thought about for many years. The book is also a testimony to the sacrifices suffered by the casualities of the troubles, the servicemen, servicewomen, their families and of course the people of Northern Ireland, which have long been forgotten by the media and the country. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it was like to be involved in a terrosist war, similar to Iraq, in our back yard.

A Long War, 16 Jun 2008
Thanks, at last a book about the modern day forgotten war. Well put together and with the information coming from the Security Forces on the ground, it gave a true insight as to the real side of the troubles. Reading this has helped me tell my own family what happened, as at the time I was unable to do this. For those not directly involved, and interested, or just forgotten, this is what happened behind the peace talks!!

Excellent introduction to modern world history, 18 Nov 2008
The author has written several books in this series and this is an interesting and comprehensive introduction to the subject.

This book is pitched at about 'A' level or first year degree level and suitable for the intelligent layman.

Unscrambles the background to modern world events , 19 Sep 2006
Having recently ploughed through a dense 1000 page narrative history of the twentieth century, I had found it hard to see the wood for the trees. I was therefore very pleased to come across this much shorter book which marshalls the key facts much more clearly, with main concepts highlighted for quick reference. Not only does this make the book easy to digest on first reading, but it also greatly aids subsequent review: ideal for exams. How I wish I had been taught history this way at school!

A brilliantly clear and balanced history of the modern world., 26 May 2006
I borrowed this 4th edition(2005) from my local library and was so impressed with it that I intend to buy my own copy of this very accessible and thorough account of modern world history.
The chapter 'The new world order and the war against global terrorism' is a brilliantly clear and balanced summary of the reasons for 9/11 and the messy aftermath of the US/UK attack on Iraq - an explanation that's sadly lacking in most of our dumbed-down news media.
Someone once said that "if you don't understand what's going on in the world you must have been reading the papers". If you want to understand the state of the modern world read this marvellous book.

Clear but doesn't oversimplify ..., 25 Mar 2005
Can I recommend this book too many times?. I don't think so. In my opinion, Lowe's book is a great way to start studying history, or even to learn more if you have already started.

The reasons for that statement are many. "Mastering Modern World History" is clear but doesn't oversimplify the events it talks about. It isn't long, but it gives you a brief summary of the subjects under study and the motivation to investigate more. Also, I would like to point out that the author includes at the end of each chapter some interesting questions that are eerily similar to those a teacher might ask in an exam. If you are a student, don't panic: take advantage of this opportunity :)

"Mastering Modern World History" has many interesting illustrations, and also quite a few useful maps. This third edition includes relatively new historical events, for example the collapse of communism. All the same, I wish I could have the 4th edition, that unfortunately hasn't been published yet, because many relevant things have happened since 1997 and I would like to read about them here. That is the only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5.

To sum up, I think this is a wonderful book, and as such a great gift to yourself and others. Lowe manages to write clearly about subjects that are not simple, and surprisingly enough for those who aren't fond of history books, he also happens to write quite well. What else can I say?. Strongly recommended!.

Belen Alcat

Oustanding, 24 Oct 2001
This book is unique among most books I used for history. The important topics are highlighted, and very often the answer to an essay that may be set in an exam is found within the text e.g. what were the factors behind Mussonlini's rise to power. I used this book almost exclusively and was rewarded with an A in GCSE history so it DOES do the job.

Really bad history..., 26 Aug 2008
Silly, jingoistic, pulp history shot through with half truths, unsupported and unsupportable claims and distortions. John Lewis Gaddis is a history professor at Yale University but how he can draw so many stupid conclusions from the Cold War is beyond me. Nobody in their right mind would say that Joe Stalin was a good guy, nor would they be likely to say his successors were freedom loving liberals either but the standard neo-con treatment these days is to score points with heavy handed jingoism rather than presenting history as it happened. I'm sorely tempted to call it propaganda.

The layout of the book is extremely poor and jumps from one thing to another without any real semblance of method. You will find yourself reading about Stalin one minute, then Kruschev the next and finally back to Stalin again. Very confusing and giving the appearance that he has something of an obsession with Stalin.

His assertion that the US achieved its amazing industrial power due to a lack of Government intervention is a neo-con line which is not supported in fact. Most US Government war contracts were designed to fulfil Government specifications. His claim that Americans in 1945 lived in the freest society on the planet is unsupportable. Obviously he has never been to Australia, New Zealand or Eire. When he said nobody knows how the Berlin Blockade started, I couldn't believe my eyes! Both Hilton and Taylor explain it in their respective books on the Berlin Wall.

He spends barely a page on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and scarcely bothers to explain that the missiles were installed because of fears that the US would invade after the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion the year before. Asserting that this information has only just been released from Soviet archives does nothing for the argument. Blind Freddy could have seen that.

When the Soviets or the Chinese cracked down on insurgencies in their own territories or those of a client state, Gaddis digs deep for another triumphant assertion that the US never did this but does not concede that the states they supported most certainly did, especially the dictatorships they cheerfully installed in Central and South America. Later in the book he does point out the activities undertaken by the CIA in South America but by then it's scarcely relevant.

Another example of his oversimplified a polarised view is that all the US leaders were great and all the Communist leaders were murderers. Nobody would deny the issues but a better explanation of their reasons goes begging for the duration of the book. I am most decidedly a Kennedy fan but he oversimplifies the margins between western and communist leaders to the point that it is no longer representative of reality. A decided point of view can be a strong point of a book but when there is no clear, clinical analysis (devoid of political agendas), the real issues go missing from a book where they should be paramount and people simply end up misinformed. How he could write a book like this and barely mention the UK and especially the role of MI6, is truly a wonder of the world.

This is junk. How it got such rave reviews I haven't the faintest idea. His oversimplified, polarised points of view do nothing to give the reader any insight into what really happened. Both Christopher Hilton and Frederick Taylor wrote better Cold War history in their books on the Berlin Wall. So did David Stafford in his book "Spies Beneath Berlin". All these authors point out the shortcomings of the Eastern Bloc system, Stalinism and the murderous repression of democratic principles. If this book is where history is going then I lament the passing of truth and objectivity. This is rubbish. Avoid it like the plague.

Fantastic As An Introduction..., 02 Feb 2008
I, like many others, had my interest in the cold war peaked by glamorous tales of espionage and horrific tales of near nuclear holocaust. The only problem was, I found myself lacking any real knowledge of events leading to the birth of the cold war or any real facts about the war itself other than 'Kennedy didn't really get on with those Russians and Cubans'.
This book gave me the opportunity to change that. Don't get me wrong; I do not, after reading this book, consider myself to now be an expert on the cold war, and if you consider yourself to be an expert, don't even give this book a second look, (I was going to say 'don't give this book a chance' but then felt that this was an unfair comment).
It's an information packed book and a history told with a clear, fluid dialect.
My one problem with this book is the discussion of the Korean War where the author indulges himself in a 'What If' scenario without informing the reader until a few paragraphs later that this was a fictional possibility. However, this is probably brought on by the fact that I had sent a text message to my dad stating boldly, 'This book is so wrong... I know for a fact no atomic or hydrogen weapon has ever been used in aggression other than on Japanese soil', realizing in the next paragraph that I'm a hot headed fool.
Moral of the review...
John Lewis Gaddis has written a very good introduction to a subject that should be taught in schools so that we, as a species, can learn from our mistakes but also that I... am a 'jump to conclusions' idiot.


Very One Sided, 21 Jan 2008
As a read, the book is good (why it gets 2 stars.) As an objective book of the Cold War it is not. For a proffessional critique of this book see David Painter's review 'A Partial History of the Cold War.' in Cold War History, 6:4, 527 - 534.
It ignores a lot of recent work on the Cold War and presents as 'fact' things that are not universally agreed on. If your view of the Cold War is based solely on this book then you will struggle to objectively analyse the Cold War. It is a shame for an academic as renowned as Gaddis to completely ignore other sides of the argument, he may not agree with them but it is right to acknowledge their existence. If you are looking for something more objective try Zubok & Pleshakov's 'Inside the Kremlin's Cold War' or anything by Len Scott.

A Cold War Student

Very readable introduction to the topic, 12 Jan 2008
Being relatively ignorant of the cold war and its causes, I picked up this book on a whim. I've found it very readable, gripping really, in the manner of a bestseller. The protagonists of the drama of the century past are laid out well, and if you can see past the tendency for the book to portay democratic/egalitarian values as having started from a moral high ground, very educational. Surprisingly, a light and filling read

Going back to my youth, 21 Sep 2007
as I get to middle age (42..) I'm looking back at all sorts and re-reading "o" level novels etc to see what more I get out of them. As an A level history student I studied and lived through the cold war and this was a superb way to re-open the door and reactivate my interest in the subject. If amazon allow a sales plug, I'd suggest a read of this followed by a trip to the national cold war museum at Cosford, informative and scary.

Twenty-five years after first setting foot on Lebanese soil, award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has revised his brilliant study of this troubled country, Pity the Nation, for a third edition, to include the years since its initial publication in 1990. Artificially created as a country by the French in 1920, Lebanon's revenge was to "welcome all her invaders and then kiss them to death". Since arriving during the 1976 Muslim-Maronite civil war, Fisk has travelled its length to seek out, as well as provide, eye-witness account of combat and atrocity. The book's main pre-occupation is the Israeli invasion of the early 1980s and its terrible aftermath, including the appalling massacre of Palestinians at the Shabra and Chatila camps. Banned in Lebanon itself, the first edition of Pity the Nation ended with close friend and colleague Terry Anderson still being held by Islamic Jihad. Inevitably, Anderson's release in 1991, along with other Western hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy, emotionally informs the bulk of the new material, which also considers the Gulf War, Islamic resurgence, the collapse of the Oslo peace agreement and the bloody 1996 Qana massacre in a UN refugee compound by Israeli forces, to which Fisk bears terrible witness. He sees Yasser Arafat make the transmission from "terrorist to superstatesman to superterrorist", but by the end of this exhaustive testimony, virtually the last Western journalist left in West Beirut, he admits, "I still fear the monsters". And then Ariel Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel in February 2001.

Fisk, formerly of The Times and now Middle East correspondent for The Independent, writes as combatively as the events he so vividly describes. With a fastidious eye for detail, he rails against day-tripping reporters who betray truth with their clichés and loose language, constantly defending language against false appropriation: "terrorism", for example, wielded by one side to describe acts committed against them, deprives the term of any objective purpose and thus legitimises reprisal. He makes reparation with this unique and passionate analysis, still angry after all these years, which remains the most relentless and convincing account yet of the bloodiest quarter-century in Lebanon's history. --David Vincent

Fascinating, but not to be read as a history book, 26 Aug 2008
I picked this up after watching "The Lives of Others." The book is well written, mixing evocative (sometimes over-elaborate) reflections with a much more sparse style when retelling some of the scarcely believable stories of the misery of life in the GDR. Some of her observations are very sharp, such as her objection to items which are still of live interest being put on display in a museum. I thought the ending was disappoint