good subject, poor book - Rated 
While the subject is fascinating, I found this poorly written, with unnecessary repetition and the author jumping around all over the place - quite how the detailed description of the GDR leaders' houses fitted into the rest of the chapter is still unclear to me. There also seemed to be an anti-GDR/Soviet bias - it is not made as clear as it should have been exactly why the Soviets cut off the Western part of Berlin and harassed the US and British in the first place. And as a previous reviwer wrote, the 1980's is skimmed over. Best avoided. Read Tony Judt instead.
Excellent Read - Rated 
This is a superb book giving not only the history of the building of the wall and up to its demise but also a brief history of Berlin and how it evolved over the centuries.
Superb
Entertaining history of frighteningly recent events in Europe - Rated
Frederick Taylor's book is a superb social and political history of the concrete wall that divided the people of East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
This is a fascinating subject. For most of my lifetime up to the fall of the Wall eighteen years ago, a part of Europe not so far from home ran along the lines of a truly authentic Orwellian dictatorship. The notorious East German secret police (the Ministry for State Security or `Stasi') spied, poked and pried into the lives of every single citizen, looking for and punishing any form of dissent against the regime. Even in the Soviet Union, the DDR's `motherland', the ratio of `watched' to `watchers' was never anywhere near as high.
At the end of the Second World War, West Berlin was occupied by the British, French and Americans, with the Soviet Union looking after the East of the city. Shortly afterwards, the border between Soviet-occupied East Germany and the newly proclaimed Republic of West Germany was drawn several miles to the West. Effectively, West Berlin became a `capitalist' island in a communist sea. The Wall was erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of East German defectors, hitherto able to permanently vacate life in the 'East' by simply crossing the city. The leaders of the DDR and their Soviet backers claimed at the time that they were trying to prevent 'Westerners' from crossing over to buy cheap Eastern goods but, with defections across the porous border running into thousands every week, it was clear what the real intention was.
Taylor's book charts the history of events leading up to the building of the Wall, subsequent efforts to broker a compromise and the eventual decline of the DDR leading to the toppling of the Wall and German reunification. Amongst the cast are the leading characters of US President John F. Kennedy, Mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt and the terrifyingly committed East German Presidents, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honeker. Behind the main story, there are also tales of daring escape attempts through underground tunnels, dark sewers and across the icy waters of the River Spree. There is also plenty of social and cultural background fleshing out the story of how the two halves of the city developed in parallel after the Wall went up. I particularly liked the part about East German punks and the interest the Stasi took in them.
If I have one criticism it is that the late 1970s and early 1980s are dealt with quite quickly. This was `my era' and I would have liked to have read more of Taylor's social history of that time. That is a small criticism really and this is still a marvellous book, very entertainingly written.
Excellent introduction into the politics and history behind the wall - Rated
Taylor's flowing style and focus on the affects of the wall on the general population of Berlin as well as the politics behind it's construction and eventual demolition.
There are some heart rendering stories of individual courage which contrast nicely in parts with the paranoid nature of the Cold War. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone looking for a initial look into the events behind some of the most stark images of the 20th Century.
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