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    <name><![CDATA[David]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Seattle, WA]]></location>        
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  <id type="integer">3344411</id>
  <isbn>1933633638</isbn>
  <isbn13>9781933633633</isbn13>
  <ratings_count type="integer">193</ratings_count>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">98</text_reviews_count>
  <title>Every Man Dies Alone</title>
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  <link>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3344411.Every_Man_Dies_Alone</link>
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  <id type="integer">227026</id>
  <name>Hans Fallada</name>
  <ratings_count type="integer">357</ratings_count>
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    <rating>5</rating>
  <votes>1</votes>
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  <read_at>Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Tue Jun 30 07:51:14 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Tue Jun 30 07:51:47 -0700 2009</date_updated>
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    <body><![CDATA[I must have read dozens of thrillers set in Germany during World War II, but even the best of them (possibly Marshall Browne’s Eye of the Abyss) cannot touch Fallada’s unforgettable novel of life under and in the midst of the third Reich. The death of their son in the conquest of France provokes taciturn factory foreman Otto Quangel and his meek wife Anna into an act of resistance that is no less dangerous for its smallness and ineffectuality. They drop subversive postcards around the city like messages in a bottle, in hopes of waking the sleeping consciences of the fellow citizens, and slowing down the war effort bit by bit. They hope that these seeds will grow and spread, but in fact many of them are turned in to the authorities. The Gestapo go to work tracking down the source of the cards, with results that are both woefully expected and tragically surprising. The Quangels are unlikely heroes, as was Fallada, a man wrecked by life under the Nazis. Fallada (his real name was Rudolph Ditzen) spent the much of the war in an asylum and died soon after the end of the war of an overdose of morphine, shortly after writing this novel in just 24 days, a truly heroic – and astonishing – act. The story is based upon a Gestapo file of a family that participated in the resistance, and the moment by moment truth of the account is obviously drawn from Fallada’s own lived experiences as a troubled, fallible and deeply moral man who made his own share of compromises to get by. The book eschews the easy generalizations and simplifications of most such stories, exploring the daily realities of life under the Nazis, and the countless shades of gray that exist between black and white. It is not a story of great men or dramatic acts of courage or villainy, but of small adjustments, little denials, expedient compromises and real struggles that take place not in the abstract realm of ideals, but in a world of groceries, careers and families. Reading the book, you can’t help but ask yourself just what you might have done if you had been living in Berlin during the war. You look at your friends and coworkers and imagine which of them would hunker down or go along to get along, which would fight back, and which would be basking in the glow of success within the party ranks, rising stars of the Reich. After all, the Nazis were people. There is no difference between a toady and a Nazi toady, a bully and a Nazi bully, a bureaucrat and a Nazi bureaucrat, a zealot and a Nazi zealot. The Reich played upon those same personality traits that exist within us all. There is a staggeringly short distance between not valuing one’s fellow beings, and committing acts of genocide upon them, and the very same kind of casual cruelty and apathetic selfishness that put Hitler in power is at work each and every day in the streets of our cities, and our own lives. The book has the rough texture of documentary history, yet ultimately it is a work of tremendous moral heft. In fact, I think it just might be one of the best things I’ve ever read. Yes, it is desperately bleak, and yet there are small moments of kindness, and a resounding sense of how even a small, doomed act of rebellion can be a triumph of the spirit, and a triumph in God’s eyes, if there is a god, and if he’s watching.]]></body>
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