All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Listen to the five episodes here.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days has been named one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Books of 2021.
Read the full list here.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a New York Public Library Book of the Day.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a Barnes & Noble Best History Book of 2021.
Read the full list here.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice in the August 26, 2021 issue of the Book Review.
Read the full list here.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice in the August 12 issue of the Book Review.
Read the full list here.
NPR’s Tamara Keith speaks with author Rebecca Donner about her new book, 'All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler.' You can listen to the author interview here.
“Donner quotes passages from her sources at length, letting the reader dwell on facts rather than galloping through them. She does this stylishly, sometimes presenting events in chronological lists or highlighting fragments from her research as stand-alone text. The archival quality of the book, its enumeration and cataloging of sources, is both surprising for a biography — too rarely the site of literary innovation — and affecting.”
Read the full review here.
The New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul interviews Rebecca Donner about her book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
To listen, click here and go to the 21:30 mark.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a New York Times Bestseller!
“Astonishing…wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography….[an] extraordinarily intimate book… Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece, so this is a family history too. It is also a story of code names and dead drops, a real-life thriller with a cruel ending — not to mention an account of Hitler’s ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer.”
Read the full review here.
“Ms Donner has pieced the story together from a vast array of sources. Her book is a tour de force of investigation: she searched two dozen archives in America, Europe and Russia, trawling through intelligence reports and official documents, plus scores of published and unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters.”
Read the full review here.
“Though the lore surrounding Harnack is riddled with inaccuracies, Donner sets the record straight.”
Read the full article here.
“When author Rebecca Donner learned that a 89-year-old man named Donald Heath Jr. was alive in California, ‘I got on a plane immediately,’ she says. Heath, the son of an American intelligence operative, had been a courier for a German resistance group in Nazi Berlin.”
Read the full article here.
"In the new biography 'All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler,' Donner brings her ancestor to life through artful use of documents and interviews. Donner is also a novelist, and she tells Harnack's story with dramatic pace and vision."
Read the full article here.
“Since childhood, Rebecca Donner had known that she was heir to an important – and little-known — story of World War II resistance. Her Milwaukee-born great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, in concert with her German husband, Arvid Harnack, led a circle of anti-Nazi resisters in Berlin.”
Read the full interview here.
“The riveting story of the only American to help lead a resistance group against the Nazis.”
Read the full review here.
“A gorgeous collage of history and family lore, a revelatory window onto a Götterdämmerung that transformed the world forever.”
Read the full review here.
“A powerful book… Ms. Donner’s use of the present tense increases the feeling of inevitability as she unfolds her story to its horrific conclusion... A nonfiction narrative with the pace of a political thriller, it’s imbued with suspense and dread… a deeply affecting biography, meticulously researched and illustrated… Ms. Donner evocatively brings to life the giddy feeling of freedom under the Weimar regime in Berlin and how swiftly it eroded. Her account of the decline of liberties is harrowing.”
Read the full review here.