pulse magazine berlin
in partnership with icd
kurfürstendamm 207-208
Berlin D-10719
queries and submissions:
pulseberlin@gmail.com, editors@pulseberlin.com
www.pulse-berlin.com
Andrea Hiott, the founding editor of our bilingual cultural journal Pulse in Berlin, and recent travelogue writer for German photographer Tobias Zielony’s Manitoba, has written “a strange interdisciplinary new work” about the giant company Volkswagen and its original little car. As reviews describe it, Hiott’s book Thinking Small: The Long Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle (Random House, NYC) is “a subtle and unexpected genre bender”, the first “social and cultural history” of the VW Beetle, a car otherwise known to us as the Kaefer, Typ 1, Coccinelle, Fusca, Voucho, Foxi, Poncho, Maggiolino, Kever, and more. Thinking Small is an easy-to-read narrative that is “deceptively simple” and “insistently intense” in its deconstruction of the storied company, tracing the car through its metamorphosis from a symbol of fascism to capitalism; from its birth in Nazi Germany to its being saved by the British and postwar Germany, and eventually to its becoming the American child of the sixties and the Summer of Love. The car is a canvas, representing an “amalgamation of the larger shifts taking place in the world”, “a symbol of two antithetical ideas of utopia, one animated by racial hatred, the other by unconditional love”. Though the book is breezy at times (some say it reads too easily) and challenging at others (some say it is too difficult), it is ultimately a nuanced and deep examplar of how we are all responsible for one another as global citizens, be that when it comes to innovation and technologies and education, to the destruction that comes from our misperceptions and our crimes, or to the goodness and clarity that comes from our heroisms and inner triumphs.
Some LINKS on Thinking Small: The Long Strange Trip and on Manitoba and Pulse:
San Francisco Chronicle:
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/20/RVNC1MN9PN.DTL
Amazon USA Reviews:
www.amazon.com/Thinking-Small-Strange-Volkswagen-Beetle/dp/0345521420?tag=aolholiday-20
Spector Books (Manitoba by Tobias Zielony with Andrea Hiott):
www.spectorbooks.com
Der Spiegel, Manitoba:
www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,797250,00.html
Huffington Post, Andrea Hiott blog:
www.huffingtonpost.com/andrea-hiott/volkswagen-beetle-history_b_1199340.html
Apple Store:
itunes.apple.com/us/book/thinking-small/id431519660?mt=11
Bloomberg Businessweek:
www.businessweek.com/magazine/book-review-thinking-small-by-andrea-hiott-01052012_page_2.html
Page 99:
page99test.blogspot.com/2012/02/andrea-hiotts-thinking-small.html
Wall Street Journal:
www.kansascity.com/2012/01/20/3380251/book-review-thinking-small-tells.html
Good Reads:
www.goodreads.com/book/show/11957027-thinking-small
Campaign for the American Reader:
americareads.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-is-andrea-hiott-reading.html
KOW gallery Berlin:
www.kow-berlin.info/news
(Where there will be an upcoming event with Andrea Hiott and Tobias Zielony on April the 12th).
Pulse Magazine Berlin: (new issue out now: MONEY)
www.pulse-berlin.com
