8:20am Thursday 9th July 2009
By Maggie Hartford
The File: A Personal History
Timothy Garton Ash (Atlantic, £9.99)
This book first came out in 1997, after Oxford historian Prof Garton Ash asked to see the file on him compiled by East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, under Communism. This edition has been reissued with a new afterword, in which the professor reveals his discovery that he was banned from the communist country because the minister for state security took umbrage at an article in the news magazine Der Spiegel. Garton Ash believes recent laws now mean that Britons now have their individual liberty less protected than East Germans. “Of course, Britain is not a Stasi state,” he concludes. “But if the Stasi now serves as a warning ghost, scaring us into action, it will have done some good after all.”
Contented Dementia
Oliver James (Vermillion, £12.99)
James is a child psychologist and a talented writer about the way society causes unhappiness. For this book he teamed up with his mother-in-law, Penny Garner, who pioneered, in Burford, a new way of relating to people suffering from dementia. It’s an inspiring book, and since the book was published in hardback last year, the Burford centre has been training professionals and families in the method, called Specal. They now hope the approach will be adopted by everyone who deals with people with memory problems.
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