The director of communications for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and former Newsweek correspondent Michael Meyer discusses his new book, The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Scribner, 2009), with Joseph Planta; they talk about the events in eastern Europe twenty years ago in Hungary and throughout the communist bloc that led to the fall of the Wall, Romania and the Ceausescu’s, and the lessons we can apply to today.

The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer. (Scribner, 2009) Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: The Year that Changed the World

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line. This is THECOMMENTARY.CA.

I was seven years old when the Berlin Wall came down, and so a lot of my knowledge about the end of the Cold War comes from a reading and viewing of history. There’s a lot of what the historian Tony Judt calls ‘mis-memory.’ It seems there’s a lot we don’t clearly know. A new book, in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, sheds light on what happened in 1989. The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall is an eyewitness account of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe from Michael Meyer, who at the time was Newsweek’s bureau chief in Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans. It is a tremendous, riveting book; it reads like a novel in some parts. Michael Meyer is currently the director of communications for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and he joins me from New York City this day. He’s also the author of Alexander Complex. The Year that Changed the World is published by Scribner. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Michael Meyer; Good morning, Mr. Meyer.

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