Ms. Tisch is that all too rare New York dynamo who gets involved in good causes, gives 110 percent and finds herself thrust into positions of power because she simply cares more passionately, and works harder, than anybody else in the room. To cite a few examples, she is chairperson of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, overseeing an annual budget of $100 million. And she sits on the executive committees of the Citizens Budget Commission, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 

Long an education advocate and expert, she has been a teacher herself, and holds masters (New York University) and doctorate (Columbia) degrees in education. All of which means her new role as regents chancellor will hardly be ceremonial; she will treat it as a full-time commitment and has declared herself a vigorous supporter of local innovation, accountability and higher standards. New York has been a hotbed for educational trend setting and the pursuit of excellence over the past few years. This appointment is a further step in that direction.

Four years ago, when the first fifth graders walked through the doors of Harlem Village Academy, they mirrored the sad decline of New York City public schooling, their scores placing them in the nation’s bottom 20th percentile. Last year, those same students ranked No. 1 in math out of all the non-selective public schools in the state. Properly motivated and challenged—kids are in classes from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.—students who otherwise were headed toward becoming members of the forgotten, adrift community of under-educated New York teens have instead thrived and established themselves firmly on the road to college.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s commitment to charter schools—which operate with public money but are not subject to union control—has not made him popular with the teacher’s union. The argument goes that charter schools increase the gap between educational haves and have-nots. That’s ridiculous. Charter schools provide those parents who can’t afford private schools with choices. And they raise the bar for non-charter schools, which is good for everybody.

Over 100 charter schools will be up and running come September, compared with 17 when Michael Bloomberg took office. As Barack Obama begins the long, hard road of bringing American public school students up to par with our competitors overseas, New Yorkers can take pride that the bold experiment has already begun in our city, with great results.

Governor’s Island, a former Coast Guard base, was turned over to the state and city years ago under a plan put together by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like the grand train station that Moynihan envisioned for the old General Post Office building on Eighth Avenue, the Governor’s Island project has suffered from malign neglect. Lots of people talk about the potential of these projects. But few wish to pay for them. A joint state-city corporation has been attempting to develop plans to convert the island to a recreational facility and center for arts and culture. But now the agency is running out of money and  Governor David Paterson included no money for the island in next year’s budget. The island, which attracted more than 100,000 visitors last year despite limited access and facilities, may have to close.  There was a time when the State of New York had the financial resources and organizational know-how to develop major projects in New York City, such as the Javits Convention Center, Battery Park City and, of course, the now destroyed World Trade Center. But if there is one thing we have learned over the past decade, it is that New York City is far better equipped than the state to carry out large-scale physical development.

Under the island’s current stewardship, money is scarce. The island’s corporation cut $7 million from its operating budget, from $18.8 million to $11.8 million, hoping that Mr. Paterson might cough up some money in the coming weeks. But that’s no way to develop what ought to be a magnet for tourists and city residents.

City Hall is hardly awash in cash, but it does have vision and the will to execute. If Albany has other priorities, so be it: Mr. Paterson should concede the obvious and let the mayor proceed without him.

The real shame, of course, is that this project didn’t get done when times were better. Senator Moynihan used to grumble about New York’s inability to get things done in a timely manner. He was right, but then again, that’s hardly news.

Could I exist in the year of my birth?

I belong to a generation whose tech transition was nuanced. Upon parting from bunkmates in camp, I gave out my snail mail address and shed tears. When my boyfriend’s job flies him to L.A., I know his office doesn’t block gChat, so I care less than I probably should.

In college, sophomore year we pooled to buy a stubborn boy a mobile. (Without it, it was just too tough to ever see him.) That year everyone started using Facebook. I started to mass-text: “What R U up 2?” And when I moved into my first apartment—the event when one considers subscribing to a newspaper—The Times went free online.

Is technology spoiling my generation—withering our social graces, falsifying our relationships, sucking away our ability to concentrate on an article longer than 200 words? To answer that, I went a week without any technology invented after 1985. No Internet, no email, no cell phone, no cable TV.

My blackout starts at midnight. It’s Chinese New Year’s Eve, allowing for the expunging of bad spirits. The afternoon is one of dread and printouts—a few appointments and some background legwork on articles I’m working on; it comes to 122 pages. Every necessary number in my cell phone gets transcribed onto a piece of paper I will fold and carry with me. I send notes to editors—If they want me this week, I’m only available by phone. I feel a lightness.

But then I start to dread every passing minute. Do I have her phone number, his? Ten thirty p.m., and I’m warming my face in the glow of the laptop for these last precious hours.

I can’t bear the thought of going for a run without an iPod, so I walk to the pool. I would like to be able to say that walking without music attunes me to the natural, sensual music of the streets. Instead it makes everything seem uglier, sadder.

After my swim, I read in a cafe window in the sun, feeling like a European lady. By 4 p.m., I’m bored to death of reading the printouts and even the book I was loving just yesterday. I compose a list of things to Google next week: Rosenthal on Auschwitz, toilet mapping, $1,000 dollar dessert.

The sun is going down and I’ve accomplished nothing. I go into the city to buy a cassette tape player. They had those in 1985. The Best Buy clerk is shocked when I ask; they have none. Kmart cheerily directs me to the second floor, where I buy a hunk of silvery plastic the size and heft of Harry Potter, volume seven.

Then it’s off to 128^th Street’s Freedom Hall, where I’m taking a class on how the recession will bring about the death of capitalism. When the teacher says, “Please turn off your cell phones,” I don’t do anything. She gives me a look. In class, she explains that it’s no longer possible to “opt out” of the capitalist system.

On the subway on the way home, I’m one of the few without headphones. This is why a girl from the class sits next to me and we start talking. (In four weeks, we’ll be real friends.)

At home, I crave the glow of a screen. My roommate, a shy painter, is watching the news, and so I sit down. As we mock the weatherman, we are bonding. On my iPhone—which I’m using as my landline by keeping it perpetually plugged in—I can see my email count is 46. I cover that part with a teensy piece of tape.

I awake at 6 a.m. feeling rested. I remember: No email or Internet. And it’s too early to call anyone. I return to sleep.

I have to use my landline before I leave the house. On a voice message to my cousin, with whom I’ve scheduled dinner, I say, “I’m just writing you to confirm.” Writing?

Into my phone pops an SMS from a friend about a backpack he left at a party last week, asking for the number of the host—a writer at The Colbert Report who is dating another friend. I am gleeful to not have to reply.

Reading a paper copy of the $1.25 New York Times on the subway this morning, I feel like more of a rich person than I did when I played free applications on a beat-up iPhone.

After a job interview at Condé Nast, I would normally call friends in midtown to go to lunch, or my cousin who works at Condé Nast. But I’m too lazy to find a pay phone and scrounge up quarters. At home, I write my interviewer a paper thank-you note, only to realize I have no envelope, no stamps and do not know the location of the post office.

On the subway en route to dinner at my cousin’s house in the East 80s, because I’m not listening to music, I overhear the story of a doctor who studied Parkinson’s disease and ended up getting it herself. It was awful, they said, to know exactly how it would destroy her.

Later, going home on the train, reading the paper someone else is holding, I learn that the $825 billion bailout is not going through. At home, in an attempt to learn more, I watch a ton of local TV news, but I never get to a channel actually talking about the bailout. I realize I have no control over what I consume.

At 7, I’m meeting an aunt at the Kitchen in Chelsea, and I just have to be on time and pray she’s on time. After dinner, I end up walking past a friend’s apartment on 18^th Street and see that her lights are on. At a grimy pay phone on the corner of Six^th and 18^th, I call her. She doesn’t pick up. No One Ever Picks Up From a Number They Don’t Recognize.

My aunt works with galleries, and I’m meeting her and a friend at the Chelsea diner before gallery hopping. Am I hanging out with family more, I wonder, because as old people, they already live in a world without text and email?

I go to my aunt’s to use her landline. It’s big and plastic and I can’t work it into the crook of my arm in the way French teenagers in high-school textbooks always seemed to be able to. I call five people, and only the fifth, an unemployed friend, picks up with the kind of ring in his voice like he expects me to be a job. Sorry. Later, at home, I call the police station, whose new deputy I’ve been assigned to profile. No one ever picks up the phone. Ever.

I decide to walk to the police station. I run into a dude in jeans who asks, “Can I help you, ma’am?” This turns out to be the new deputy, whose whole spiel is that he wants to “make the office more approachable.” This will provide the perfect lead for my profile.

I go to a play, arrive super-early, so I duck around the corner to a coffee shop. An acquaintance who works there is bored, so we go bond over whiskey dicks at the Metropolitan. Afterward I swing back by the coffee shop and convince him to come to my best friend Lane’s house in Astoria and get drunk. A hot-tempered Southerner, Lane reminisces over how she has broken multiple phones by throwing them down onto slate pavements, tiled floors, brick. “I can’t actually break Scott’s neck,” she says. “But he can’t defend himself if he’s a phone.”

Then the people at Lane’s apartment party all go on YouTube, clicking from video to video.

The New York Times is five times the price of the Daily News. Reading it on the subway, you look like a rich ass. I have switched to buying the Daily News.

I think of the famous E. B. White line, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And maybe this is what I’ve been experiencing all week—making a friend on the train, dragging an acquaintance out to get drunk in Astoria, where we become legitimate friends. But also, I am seeing people less. I am more neighborhood- and family-focused. I see less, more crisply.

In the Bryant Park library are phone booths—dark and lovely as confessionals. The only person in them is on his Nokia, telling someone about his boss. It’s a Friday afternoon so I make some calls to ensure I have a social life. No one picks up save my unemployed friend, Lucy, who admits she only did thinking I was an employer calling with a job.

I call a boy I think I have a crush on to meet a few of us at the Yale Club. It turns out he has to work, but I only learn this later. In the meantime, I muster up anger toward him that turns out to be eventually useful—next week I’ll meet someone I really like.

I don’t mind waiting forever in the Yale Club lobby for Lane, watching all the young banker types swagger. This is more fun than playing iPhone Topple. Lane finally shows up with the excuse that she had an argument with her boyfriend and couldn’t call me to warn me.

We do what we would have done here 150 years ago, which is get drunk while reading the hard copy New York Times and then sneak around the private parties on the upper floors. On the 18th we find red wine and old men, singing “Danny Boy” a cappella. I drink myself through the minor chords.

Somehow we end up at the Harvard Club on a mission to affirm that there really is an elephant, stuck dead on the wall. There is; I want to take a camera-phone picture but I can’t. When I get home at 2 a.m. I have a voice mail from unemployed Lucy at 5:34 p.m.: “It’s really annoying that you’re not using technology,” she says, “’cause I actually need you for something in the next half-hour.”

It takes me 2.5 hours to read the whole Sunday Times and at the end, I basically only remember that David Segal’s article about the Mall of America uses the verb “limoed.” I watch too much of a movie with Matthew McConaughay; I compose a to-do list of what I will do when I get the Internet. Finally, it’s 12:04 a.m. Monday. I start up my laptop. Four hundred and nine emails. The ex-lover whose power ballad mix I’ve been listening to all week emailed me some shitty book of poems, and 20 minutes later I’m still reading them online.

At 2:20 a.m., I find myself watching a video called “suicide cat” on YouTube. 

Laura Lippman is a virtuoso. Prolific, yes—after a dozen novels in as many years, she chased What the Dead Know, her spellbinding drama of taken and mistaken identity, with the sturdy 10th installment in her Tess Monaghan franchise, then published a collection of short stories and a Sunday serial in The New York Times Magazine. But the psychological texture of Ms. Lippman’s fiction—its pointillist attention to detail, its robust sense of moral order—neatly rebukes critics who would dismiss her as that unspeakably base creature, the crime writer.

Life Sentences, her fourth stand-alone title, is no exception. Its heroine, Cassandra Fallows, vaulted to celebrity as the writer of two memoirs recounting her childhood in civil-rights-era Baltimore and her two failed marriages. After the tepid reception of her debut novel—“Her editor was already hinting that—much as they loved, loved, loved her novel—it would be, well, fun if she wanted to return to nonfiction”—Cassandra decides to mine the past once more, this time excavating a forgotten grade-school classmate named Calliope (“Callie-ope, almost like Alley Oop”) Jenkins, whose infant son vanished two decades ago. Rather than cooperate with the authorities, Callie languished in prison for seven years—a murderess, Cassandra assumes, a “modern-day Medea.” Yet as her investigation unsettles the sediment of Callie’s past, Cassandra plunges through a trapdoor into the sunless cellar of her own history, where truth and memory refract each other like warped mirrors. Has she misjudged the formative friendships of her youth? What secrets detonated her parents’ marriage?

It’s a canny, topical conceit: a memoirist who suddenly challenges her memories. So if Life Sentences doesn’t rival Ms. Lippman’s very best work—if her roulette wheel of narrators revolves somewhat less smoothly here than in What the Dead Know (2007); if Calliope the cipher ultimately resists scrutiny—it nonetheless burnishes the author’s reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Cassandra, fitfully neurotic, professionally self-absorbed, intrigues and exasperates equally, and her probe of a racially integrated community is both credible and revelatory. (Stephen L. Carter aside, very few mainstream novelists have featured affluent blacks in their books.)

Like Penelope at her loom, Ms. Lippman artfully weaves classical allusion into her prose. Cassandra, panting in bed against a married man whose steely wife “was formidable when denied,” compares her lover to Agamemnon, “the warrior who took Cassandra as his trophy after sacking Troy, and the two were later murdered.” Our heroine recalls how her father, a classics professor and flammable narcissist, had hoped to name her Athena: “After all, Athena sprang, fully formed, from her father’s head, while her mother … remained imprisoned inside. My father admired this arrangement.” And Calliope, of course, is the namesake of the muse of heroic poetry—who once fatefully tangled with the god of war.

By novel’s end, when the frayed filaments of plot are fluently braided and bound, Ms. Lippman has once more challenged, realigned and ultimately transcended the boundaries of genre. “How many pages could one … life produce if you weren’t a head of state or a general?” Cassandra wonders. The answer, in Laura Lippman’s case, is “not enough.”

Daniel Mallory researches modernist literature at New College, Oxford. He can be reached at books@observer.c.

Relax! Rudolph Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg have shown that partisan politics are so 20th century, at least in New York. The city has revived, and is able to confront the Great Recession, from a position of strength because it has put aside blind party loyalty in favor of problem-solving. That is the legacy of Mr. Giuliani (as mayor; not in his bizarre present incarnation) and Mr. Bloomberg, whose own party-hopping—from Democrat to Republican to independent, all in the last eight years—amplifies the point that policies matter more than party.

   Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg have been elected by forging political coalitions that have drawn upon voters from all political persuasions. The vast majority of New Yorkers may be registered Democrats, but when it comes to electing a mayor, they vote the person, not the party. Whether it is fighting crime, reducing welfare rolls, improving our parks or strengthening our economy, the interests of New Yorkers have been well served by a strong, independent mayor who put the priorities of our city ahead of any political machine.

What makes New York different from so many other cities is that we have a government that works, and works well. In part this is due to the City Charter, which was revised in 1989 to give the mayor power over the municipal budget and limit the City Council’s authority to interfere with critical decisions regarding fundamental services. In New York, the mayor has the key power of appointing and removing the commissioners responsible for basic services, such as police, fire, parks and sanitation. It is no accident that Mr. Bloomberg has picked seasoned professionals to run those departments, hard workers who have risen through the ranks and proven to be first-rate leaders.

 It’s worth noting that the fastest-growing group of voters has been unaffiliated voters, those who do not register with either political party. And as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said, “There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean the streets.”

The M.T.A. presides over New York City’s lifeblood: Our mass-transit system. As the commuter trains, subways and buses go, so goes the city—and, for that matter, the region. Without safe, reliable and efficient public transportation, city and suburb alike would become unbearably congested and downright unlivable.

So it behooves state legislators from both parties, representing not just the five boroughs but the suburbs as well, to stop playing politics and get onboard the rescue express. A bailout plan devised by former M.T.A. chairman Richard Ravitch faces an uncertain future in the State Senate, thanks in part to the opposition of three Democratic senators. If the new Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, cannot count on the support of Brooklyn Senator Carl Kruger and Bronx Senators Pedro Espada Jr. and Ruben Diaz Sr., he will have to reach out to Republicans in order to win passage of the plan.

Senate Republicans, however, seem as determined as their brethren in Washington to just say no to any government action in the face of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Suburban Republicans have long made political hay by opposing measures designed to help the city—even though millions of New Yorkers from Long Island and the Hudson Valley work in the five boroughs and use city services on a daily basis. But the Republican caucus includes three senators from the city—Martin Golden of Brooklyn, Andrew Lanza of Staten Island and Frank Padavan of Queens. They have to put partisan politicking aside and line up with their Democratic colleagues in support of the bailout.

Opposition from non-Manhattan legislators is not unexpected. The bailout plan calls for, at long last, actual installation of tolls on bridges spanning the East and Harlem rivers. Mr. Ravitch originally called for a $5 toll, but the revised bailout plan would reduce the toll to the price of a subway or bus ride, currently $2. Still, outer-borough legislators have long opposed the idea of placing tolls on the free bridges, arguing that their constituents will be paying most of the freight.

That may be so, but a small toll is not too much to ask in an emergency. The problem is that some M.T.A. critics are skeptical of the agency’s books. They don’t think the problem is as dire as the M.T.A. insists. The agency says it has a deficit of $1.2 billion this year, and even larger projected deficits in coming years.

The M.T.A., like many mega-public authorities, hasn’t always been a model of cooperation. It has made enemies, and some of them see a chance for revenge now that the agency has been forced to hold out a tin cup.

But this is hardly the time to settle political scores. If the bailout fails, the M.T.A. will be forced to implement drastic increases in subway, bus and commuter fares. That would only lead to more economic misery, not only in Manhattan, but throughout the region.

Mr. Smith needs to engage in a frank conversation with his Republican colleagues—and, for that matter, with the three Democratic dissidents as well. He has the power to make their lives miserable or pleasant. He needs to use that power.

Which is why we’re heartened to see Albany moving closer to approving tolls on East River and Harlem River bridges, an idea supported by Governor David Paterson and sketched out last week by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The plan would impose a $2 toll, equal to the cost of a subway ride, and is projected to generate $450 million a year in revenue. The money would improve efficiencies by allowing the maintenance and rehabilitation costs of the bridges to be absorbed by their users. Moreover, the toll revenue would help support the city and region’s overall mass transit and commuter system, the lifeline of the city and surrounding communities.  

Of course, the opposition to tolls on these bridges is fierce. Many legislators in the State Senate and Assembly will waste no time in calling down a plague upon anyone who dares ask their outer-borough constituents to hand over two bucks for the privilege of bringing a vehicle into Manhattan. For those legislators hammering together their populist soapboxes, we would say that to pit Manhattan against the other boroughs is a silly waste of everyone’s time; Manhattan is the financial and cultural core of the city, and the other four boroughs’ fortunes rise or fall depending on how Manhattan is doing.

We urge the Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, to stand beside Speaker Silver in showing real leadership on this issue. The cost of doing nothing is huge. With a projected $1.2 billion deficit for this year, the M.T.A. will have to continue cutting service, raising fares and allowing subway stations to degenerate into squalid disrepair

The tolls should not obscure an equally crucial issue: The M.T.A. must be disabused of the notion that it can continue to operate without seriously controlling its personnel expenses. The authority’s leadership needs to find a way to get its workers to absorb a greater share of health care and pension costs. Handing the M.T.A. money must not be an excuse to avoid putting its own house in order.

Mr. Morgenthau, who announced last week that he will retire as Manhattan’s district attorney this year after nine four-year terms, certainly set a high standard for his contemporaries and his successors. He inherited an office held by two illustrious predecessors, Frank Hogan, who served from 1941 to 1974, and Thomas Dewey, who served from 1937 to 1941. But Mr. Morgenthau did more than simply build on the achievements of others. He modernized the office, created new units to investigate sex crimes and other felonies and brought racial and gender diversity to a field that was too white and too male. He also expanded the office’s portfolio, going after white-collar crooks like Dennis Kozlowski, the former head of Tyco, and other business leaders who played fast and loose with their company’s money.

He has served long enough to see how the changes he brought have revolutionized his profession. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing investigation of Bank of America and its use of bailout funds is hard to imagine without some of the precedents Mr. Morgenthau established since taking office in 1975.

While his work defined his legacy, Mr. Morgenthau’s contribution to New York is not confined to well-earned convictions and lowered crime rates. He has been and, lucky for us, he will continue to be an important presence in our civic life. His place in New York’s culture is best defined by the role he played in bringing about the Holocaust museum downtown. 

In the early 1990s, a dreary time in recent New York history, the effort to create a memorial to the Holocaust seemed exhausted and doomed. Mr. Morgenthau stepped in and began raising money—a task he had avoided because he feared potential conflicts of interest. The district attorney’s connections, energy and respect revived the effort to honor the six million Jews killed during World War II, although it remained no easy task. “A lot of people told us to go to hell,” he said in an interview several years ago.

Mr. Morgenthau, a decorated World War II veteran, persisted, as did many lesser-known advocates. Thanks in part to their efforts, the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust was dedicated in 2003. A wing of the museum is named for Mr. Morgenthau in honor of his untiring efforts as the museum’s chairman and one of its most effective fund-raisers.

Robert Morgenthau also plays another role in New York life—he is a living connection to the New Deal and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Mr. Morgenthau’s father, Henry, served as F.D.R.’s Treasury secretary from 1934 to 1945. Robert Morgenthau has vivid memories of those tumultuous years, memories that may sound all too familiar these days.

Robert Morgenthau is a true giant of New York. He will leave office with grace and dignity, and with the thanks of all New Yorkers.

A violent dipsomaniac and morphine addict, institutionalized at 18 for shooting his close friend and later arrested for embezzlement, theft and the attempted murder of his first wife, Hans Fallada (né Rudolf Ditzen), author of one of Weimar Germany’s best-selling and best-loved novels, Little Man, What Now? (both Hermann Hesse and Carl Zuckmayer called it the book of the year in 1932), has a rap sheet that rivals William Burroughs. And yet this once famous novelist of the interwar petty bourgeoisie is barely known outside of his native Germany.

The publication this month of three new English editions of Fallada’s major novels, Little Man, What Now?, The Drinker and Every Man Dies Alone, may help end this undeserved obscurity. In particular, Michael Hoffman’s translation of Every Man Dies Alone (1947)—a fictional account of wartime opposition to the Nazis—should pique curiosity in this prolific, and profligate, writer: It was the first anti-fascist novel to appear in postwar Germany, and has been unavailable in English until now.

Based on an actual Gestapo file, Every Man Dies Alone chronicles the fate of Otto and Anna Quangel, a Berlin couple who launch a campaign of civil disobedience in 1940 after the death of their son at the front. They litter the city with handwritten postcards denouncing the Nazi war machine and calling on Germans to engage in acts of sabotage and resistance.

Fallada describes in sharp and terrifying detail the Gestapo witch hunt that ensues: Distant relations of the Quangels are arrested and tortured, and those accused of even having handled the cards are made to disappear. The state surveillance apparatus has destroyed civil society: Of the 276 postcards the Quangels write, all but 18 are delivered immediately to the Gestapo. The German populace, broken by intimidation, is too frightened to be associated with any form of dissent.

TO BE CLEAR, the Quangels’ opposition has little to do with the archipelago of death camps that surround them; instead, they act from a sense of outrage at the Führer’s destructive and pointless wars, and to avenge the death of their son. While there are rumors of atrocities against Jews in Poland—and the novel’s one Jewish character, Frau Rosenthal, is mercilessly persecuted by her neighbors—the fate of the Jews in Fallada’s Germany is not much different from that of everyone else; the specter of the concentration camp looms over Jew and gentile alike.

Though perhaps deficient in its treatment of the Jewish wartime experience, Fallada’s novel—the work of one of the few German literary greats who did not emigrate during the war—provides a rich phenomenology of life lived under state surveillance: “There was no such thing,” he writes, “as private life in wartime Germany.” By the early ’40s, Fallada’s belletristic compatriots—Mann, Döblin, Brecht—were all in the United States. But Fallada chose to remain in a devastated Germany—in and out of Nazi insane asylums, struggling with the ravages of opium addiction, ever under the watchful eye of Goebbels. The perspective afforded by his decision to do so makes Every Man Dies Alone one of the most immediate and authentic fictional accounts of life during the long nightmare of Nazi rule.

James Martin is a writer and Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University. He can be reached at books@observer.com.