This month marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Malcolm Forbes reviews Iain McGregor’s “vivid account of daily life in divided Berlin.” John Fund remembers the East German dissidents he met before the fall of the Wall. In Popular Mechanics, David Hambling writes about nine “smuggling machines” that “beat” the Wall. Half of Goerlitz’s 100,000 residents left the city after the fall of the Wall. It is still recovering.

In other news: Latin is a beautiful and useful language: “Oxford professor Nicola Gardini urges people to read and study Latin. He believes that Latin is the antidote for the modern age, which seems transfixed by the spontaneous, the easy, and the ephemeral.”

In praise of Sir Walter Ralegh: “If Americans know of Sir Walter Ralegh today, it is as the founder of the ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke, which disappeared without a trace a few years after it was established on the North Carolina coast. Some, perhaps, associate him with his quixotic quest for the golden city of ‘El Dorado’ in the South American jungle. But such wispy associations fail to do justice to the colonial visionary, swashbuckling pirate, poet, courtier and alleged traitor whom Alan Gallay has vividly conjured in Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire, a richly researched and engagingly written biography.”

The story of a woman who ran an underground lottery in Detroit: “Bridgett Davis’s mother ran numbers. Growing up in Detroit, Bridgett knew to keep it a secret. But in her new book, The World According to Fannie Davis, Bridgett documents the underground lottery business her mother ran in the 1960s, when what she was doing was illegal . . . Running numbers was common in the black community during the time. Participants would choose any three numbers on a given day and if those numbers were the ones that turned up that day, you won. In the business, there were bankers and bookies. Bridgett’s mother, Fannie Davis, was both.”

Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits: “Mexican archaeologists say they have made the first ever discovery of pits built around 15,000 years ago to trap mammoths. Announcing the find on Wednesday, researchers from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said the two pits contained about 824 bones from at least 14 mammoths.”

Max McGuinness reviews Catherine Bailey’s A Castle in Wartime: One Family, Their Missing Sons, and the Fight to Defeat the Nazis—“a poignant illustration of how even the most charmed existence could unravel amid the vicissitudes of total war.”

Essay of the Day:

In Spectator, William Palmer revisits Evan S. Connell’s novel Mrs. Bridge:

“Mrs Bridge is the finest of his novels. It adopts a highly original way of telling its story, broken down into 117 vignettes, some barely a page long, such as Mrs Bridge’s comic difficulties in parking her car. Another, several pages longer, gives us a description of a dinner at the country club, where her admirably imperturbable husband insists on finishing his steak while rain and wind whip at the windows and all the other diners have fled to the cellar to escape a rapidly approaching tornado.

“The very first sentence of the novel sums up Mrs Bridge: ‘Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it.’ Her whole childhood is passed over in a few sentences – and there is not a sentence in the whole book which is not of importance – and she marries at the foot of page one. The history of her emotional life in marriage is brief and both chilling and compassionate.”

* * *

“What is truly compelling about Mrs Bridge is her very ordinariness, notwithstanding all her petty snobbery, conformism and timidity. The list is easy to make and appears to be a fairly damning indictment, but Connell is not writing a satirical portrait. His intention is to show us the utter uniqueness of this one human life, the irreplaceability of body and soul that is India Bridge. Connell portrays her so tenderly that we come to sympathize with her and, more, to care for her.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Madonna del Sasso

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.