Solving a 600-Million-Piece Puzzle My new novel, The Puzzle People, hasn't quite hit the shelves yet. But it has hit the webosphere and is now available for download on Kindle, Nook, IBook, and other electronic formats. But exactly who were the Puzzle People? My novel...
A Bureaucrat's Mistake Led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall In a country loaded with bureaucrats, it seems oddly fitting that a bureaucratic blunder would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. To set the scene, the year was 1989, and the Soviet empire was unraveling. In...
Berlin Trip Takes Me to the Site of the First Shooting Along the Wall Talk about timing. I spent the last two weeks in Austria and Berlin, in part to do research for my new novel on the Berlin Wall, The Puzzle People (which explains why I have not done a blog for...
Big Brother Takes a Big Hit in 1989 George Orwell didn't quite get it right. His landmark novel, 1984, describes the 1980s as a time in which Big Brother is all-seeing and all-controlling. Little did he know that the 1980s would be better known for taking Big Brother...
How the Church Helped Bring Down the Berlin Wall With the last name of "Fuhrer,"Â he made an unlikely German hero. His full name was Christian Fuhrer, and this pastor led a movement that helped to bring down East Germany and the Berlin Wall. They called it "the...