In the early 1980s, hardcore punk offered alienated American teenagers a chance to find each other through its network of scenes, shows and zines. It offered a crucial lifeline for kids who were coming out of abusive homes, suffering bullying at schools or simply resisting Reagan-era conservatism.

But Americans had nothing on the East German punks, as Tim Mohr brilliantly documents in his incendiary Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

As early as 1977, kids throughout East Germany heard the siren call of the Sex Pistols by tuning into banned West German radio stations. By 1981, a nascent punk scene began forming in church basements and town squares. But the consequences of looking like a punk or forming a band were dangerous. Getting hauled in by the Stasi—the East German secret police—for brutal interrogations became a daily or weekly occurrence for punks. Studios and squats were routinely searched, and being surveilled by informers was a fact of life. By 1983—the “Summer of Punk”—many of the original punks were serving prison sentences. But the flame was lit, and the torch was carried on by hundreds of kids who formed bands, squatted buildings and spoke out against the state.

Compulsively readable and beautifully researched, Burning Down the Haus records the critical role that punks played in the German resistance movements of the 1980s, up to and beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a DJ in Berlin in the early 1990s, Mohr met and became friends with many of the individuals portrayed in this book, thus giving him access to the photos, diaries and oral histories that give the book such rich, cinematic detail.

“We could do things differently here,” East German punks said, and it was a pronouncement they acted on. Their story of resistance to dictatorship is an inspiring lesson for today.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the years after World War I, as Hitler and his followers gained attention and then power in Germany, many foreign visitors, especially from Britain and the United States, poured into the country. Foreigners continued to be captivated by Germany’s natural beauty, its strong cultural heritage in literature, music and philosophy, its technological advances and the friendliness of its citizens. Years later, when those visitors looked back at their prewar visits, most genuinely claimed that they could not have been aware of the terrible actions of the Nazis. Despite rumors and evidence of disturbing activity, many had made up their minds before they came of what they were to see—or not see. Surprisingly few, it seems, had their minds changed as a direct result of their visits.

Julia Boyd has done exhaustive research on these visitors and their firsthand accounts of their visits. In her extraordinary and absorbing Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945, she tells their stories, often in their own words, as they “accidentally witnessed,” in varying degrees, the transformation of a government and its people before their eyes. The author’s nuanced and lively narrative shows that a vigorous propaganda campaign by the Nazis, targeted toward tourists and other visitors, was hugely successful for years but became less so as the government tightened its control on the eve of World War II.

Foreign diplomats and reporters followed events closely and generally understood what was going on. But others who were visiting for relatively short periods, including such keen observers as scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, were bewildered by the truth. In 1936, Du Bois wrote that it was hard to “express an opinion about Germany today which is true in all respects without numerous modifications and explanations.” That same year, author Thomas Wolfe, who loved Germany and whose novels were bestsellers there, dared to speak out in an essay critical of the regime after a Jewish acquaintance was arrested, leading to great personal cost.

These firsthand glimpses of a dark time in Germany show us the complexity of appearances, and Boyd’s book should be widely read.

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

Meet Louise Thaden, a married mother of two; Ruth Elder, a beautiful Alabama divorcée; Ruth Nichols, a woman unhappily born into wealth; and Florence Klingensmith, whose promising aviation career ended in tragedy. True resisters, they were empowered by their recently gained right to vote and inspired by aviation’s rising popularity. Charles Lindbergh’s recent solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 was an achievement that begged for a female challenger, and it had one soon enough.

O’Brien keeps a sharp eye on the planes as well. The flimsily built early aircraft regularly lost their wings, shed their wheels and exploded in flames, sometimes miraculously leaving their pilots alive and eager to fly again. Men found financial support—and better planes—much easier to come by than women, who routinely faced reporters asking why they weren’t at home cooking dinner. Elder and Klingensmith tried to dodge the husband question, while Earhart allowed her husband, prominent New York publisher George P. Putnam, to be her relentless PR man who “probably saved her from becoming a nice old maid.”

The women of aviation were “friendly enemies,” competing for speed and distance records while supporting each other on the ground and in the air. Known collectively as the Ninety Nines, they encouraged young women to aim high. As Earhart said, a woman’s place “is wherever her individual aptitude places her.”

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.