I finally got around writing the review for the last book of this trilogy which I finished last month. Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett is the conclusion to a trilogy that covers the 20th century. This 1,000 page brick covers the event that followed WWII. So it touches the Cold War, JFK, the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, the Civil Right movement, up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I’m not sure what there’s to say that hasn’t been covered in the first two posts about book #1: Fall of Giants, here, and Winter of the World, here. If you like history but having a hard time reading the stuff out there, these book provides entertainment and knowledge. You follow a bunch of characters/families throughout the major events that happened last century. The 20th century really shaped the way we live our life today, including two World Wars and a technology revolution (communications, TVs, media, airplanes, transportation/cars, Internet etc…)
My favorite was book #1, the one about WWI and the surrounding events. There was a lot I didn’t know about the first World War. The book did an excellent job explaining the complexity of the events leading up to the war. The second book covers WWII and the surround events. This last book covers a lot, from the 1960s to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s a lot of stuff and it doesn’t feel like you are reading a 1,000 page book. These books are excellent and might get even better over the years as the 20th century becomes a distant memory.
In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll.
East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives . . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own . . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he’d imagined . . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Krushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.
