Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

There’s certainly no shortage of good punk books, from memoirs and autobiographies to masterful can’t-miss histories. Still, Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall is a joy in the way it brings back punk’s fury and high stakes. Mohr—a writer, translator, and former club DJ in Berlin in the early ’90s—has spun a thrilling tale of young kids on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall in the late 1970s who, having taped punk songs off West German radio and shared them with friends, soon found themselves gathering together to demand, at first, simply the right to be themselves. Stirb nicht im Warteraum der Zukunft was what they were soon spray-painting around the city: Don’t die in the waiting room of the future. “It was a battle cry,” Mohr writes: “Create your own world, your own reality.” Soon, they formed their own Punkrat (or punk council) to organize their growing numbers and to better counter the East German Stasi, who set out to imprison and disperse them to far-flung areas of the country. While Mohr is careful to note that an epochal upheaval like the fall of the wall can’t be credited simply to a relatively small group of early adopters, his book makes a convincing—and wildly entertaining—case that without the punks to light the first sparks, Reagan’s much-ballyhooed “tear down this wall” speech would have been as roundly ignored around the rest of the world as it was in both East and West Berlin at the time. —Corey Seymour, Senior Editor

Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister

Let others have their fear; I’ll take my anger. Rebecca Traister’s new book is the kind of galvanizing read that you want to press into the hands of every disillusioned, dispirited, and fed-up woman in your orbit. Traister has become one of the most prominent voices—if not the voice—of 21st-century feminism, for her insightful, timely responses to the injustices and insults still suffered all too frequently by women and other disadvantaged populations. Here, she takes that simultaneously wise and cutting sensibility and applies it to both recent (and not-so-recent) events. If journalism is history in real time, here is a journalist writing history—with just enough distance and context to inform and contextualize, but without losing the animating fires that we so greatly need in our public discourse. —Chloe Schama, Senior Editor