The Greatest Escape
I trudged along a canal in Berlin back in 2011, hoping to see the inside of one of the few remaining watchtowers in the city—a guard tower where East Berlin soldiers kept an eagle...
The Ladies in White Live On
Fidel Castro is dead. But the Ladies in White live on.
Yoani Sanchez, one of the strongest voices for freedom in Cuba, tells about the origins of the Ladies in White movement in a 2011...
The Men Who Wouldn’t Stop Clapping
The audience exploded into applause. Every person in the room jumped up and began to wildly clap, as if racing each other to see who could get to their feet the fastest. The applause...
Finding New Life in the Death Strip
An elderly man shoves two packages out of a fourth floor window, and then he crawls out and sits on the ledge, staring down at the ground below. Then slowly, carefully, he turns himself...
The Puzzle People on CBS in Champaign
I did an interview on my Berlin novel, "The Puzzle People," this past week in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Wall came down on November 9, 1989,...
How Prayer Brought Down the Berlin Wall
This week, as the world observed the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the forgotten stories from the amazing year of 1989 was what took place in Leipzig, East...
Wind of Change
One of the great things about researching my novel, The Puzzle People, was that I could go to Youtube and see videos taken of the Berlin Wall as it went up in 1961 and then came...
Thousands Protest Removal of Wall
In 1989, tens of thousands of protesters tore down the Berlin Wall. But as The New York Times points out, the irony is that in 2013 people are protesting because they want the Wall to stay...
Swords and Plowshares in the Heart of Berlin
When I was writing my novel The Puzzle People, I came across a photo of the Church of Reconciliation as it was being blown up in 1985 (shown on the left). But what caught...
Why is the Berlin Wall in My Living Room?
Okay, so the Berlin Wall in my living room doesn't quite match the real Wall's dimensions. But it comes close.
The last generation of the Wall before it came down on November 9, 1989, stood...
