Reading and Discussion
“All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days”: Book Talk with Rebecca Donner
![Book cover: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days Book cover: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days](/resources/files/jpg1080/coverbild-c-little-brown-and-company--formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)
Journalist and writer Rebecca Donner makes a virtual visit Seattle for a conversation with Martin Schwartz, Goethe Pop Up Seattle’s Program Curator, about her most recent book.
An instant bestseller and the New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler chronicles the extraordinary life and brutal death of the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during WWII. The woman at the center of this story: Donner’s own great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, a graduate student in Germany during the rise of the Nazi regime.
This event will take place online at 6:00 pm PT. Please register via Eventbrite to receive Zoom access info.
Registration
About the book:
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (published May 2021)
By Rebecca Donner
![Book cover: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days Book cover: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days © © Little, Brown and Company Book cover: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days](/resources/files/jpg1079/book-cover-c-little-brown-and-company-formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)
Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
“Highly evocative, deeply moving, a stunning literary achievement. Rebecca Donner forges a new kind of biography—almost novelistic in style and tone, this scholarly work resurrects the courageous life Mildred Harnack, an unsung American hero who led part of the German resistance to the Nazi regime. A relentless sleuth in the archives, Donner has written a page-turner story of espionage, love, and betrayal.”—Kai Bird.
“Extraordinarily intimate… Wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography… a real-life thriller with a cruel ending—not to mention an account of Hitler’s ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer.”—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times.
![Rebecca Donner Rebecca Donner © © Beowulf Sheehan Rebecca Donner](/resources/files/jpg1080/rebecca-donner-c-beowulf-sheehan-formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)