The festive atmosphere as the Wall came down in 1989 (image courtesy of Wikipedia)
Thirty-five years ago today, I stood in my apartment in Seattle and watched images like this on my TV with tears in my eyes. I’d been in East Berlin just weeks before and seen new friends there shy away from Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point to the West, while I passed through freely. My tears were tears of joy for them.
My forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour (publication date: January 28, 2025), takes place in Germany and nearby countries in the years right after the Wall fell, when there was hope and even belief everywhere that freedom would always eventually triumph over tyranny.
1989 was an extraordinary year, and that day, November 9, when the Wall came down, was the most extraordinary of all.
A beautiful new endorsement of THE LAST GRAND TOUR by Chelsea Bieker, author of the new breakout bestseller MADWOMAN.
“[Bieker’s] writing is raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence, the constant tension carried by survivors.”
The publication-day launch for The Last Grand Tour is set for 7 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland!
I hope you’ll be there!
If you can’t come, you can pre-order the book from Powell’s and they’ll send you a signed copy right after the event. Just click here.
I’m delighted to have documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom interviewing me that night. A few months ago, I attended a pre-release showing of Brian’s latest film, Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, and was blown away. It’s a thoroughly fascinating look at the difficult times of a terrifically talented singer-songwriter whose name and songs might have become as common as those of Joni Mitchell or James Taylor if her life had gone differently.
Lost Angel is available on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime. And Brian’s earlier documentary, Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, is available on Kanopy. He is currently working on a documentary about the marathon program at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn, OR, and a follow-up to his 2016 film Mothering Inside about the Family Preservation Project at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, OR.
Here’s a trailer for Lost Angel, which includes interviews with Jackson Browne, David Crosby, and other noted musicians from the 1970s scene in LA’s Laurel Canyon:
And here’s one of the many covers of Judee’s hauntingly beautiful love song “The Kiss” you can find on YouTube (this one by Adam Brett Ward):
I hope you’ll come out on January 28 to celebrate the release of The Last Grand Tour into the world!
For those who don’t know about Kirkus starred reviews, here’s what one author wrote about them:
“Kirkus stars are like diamonds: extremely rare. A starred review is the top of the top, a prestigious, Holy Grail that highlights books of “exceptional merit.” A starred review represents outstanding writing.”
This kind of attention is huge for a first novel from a small publisher. I’m deeply thankful to the unnamed reviewer.
In the fall of 1986, my buddy Steve Smith and I spent two weeks in St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) and Moscow with a student exchange group. Mikhail Gorbachev, who would eventually dismantle the Soviet Union, had been in power only a year, but the students we met were already testing the possibilities for more freedom.
Because Gorbachev’s reign was so new, conditions throughout the country remained the way they’d been for decades. One of my first realizations upon seeing the relative poverty and the poor conditions in which people lived was that the US government had been overselling the Soviet threat for years. This feeling was enhanced by how generous (though reticent) the people we met were.
That’s me in the blue coat–and is that a KBG agent taking my picture?
Among the things I remember most clearly were the lines everywhere for basic goods, the empty grocery stores, and the restaurant where I tried to order off a menu full of items, only to be told again and again that they didn’t have my choice. Finally, I asked what they did have and the waiter pointed to two or three things.
A line of women hoping to buy…what?
I shot only slides in those days, and I took these iPhone stills with the slides set on top of a light table, so they aren’t as clear as they might be–but you get the picture, so to speak.
The other day I found my passport from the late ’80s and early ’90s, with all of the stamps from Western and Eastern Europe in it, and thought it might be a good subject for my first video.
In 1986 alone, I traveled to Finland, the Soviet Union, Ukraine, East Germany, and most of the countries of Western Europe, including Spain and Portugal, which were new members of the European Union.
In 1989, I started leading annual tours to Greece and Turkey, and in 1993, just four years after the Berlin Wall fell, I led my first tour into Eastern Europe: Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. My little tour company, Halcyon Tours, was one of the first to take Americans into what had only recently been Soviet-dominated countries.
I’ll post more about those old tour days in the coming weeks, as we move toward the January 28, 2025, launch of my novel, The Last Grand Tour. (For a synopsis of the book and pre-ordering information, click on the title.)
For now, here’s my first video. I’d love it if you’d let me know what you think of it.
When I was a kid, you could send in bubblegum wrappers and get prizes. I found this envelope that held one of them in an old box yesterday. (Notice the cost for mailing a package then: six cents.)
It may have held the tiny transistor radio I took to my grade school to listen to the baseball playoffs while in class. My teacher never noticed the wire going up to my ear.
That had to be about this time of year. The team I was cheering for was the Cincinnati Reds, one of whose stars, Pete Rose, died a couple of days ago. The other stars were Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench.
The Reds lost the World Series to the Oakland A’s in seven games that year.
The other day, Sylvia brought out photo albums from our tour guiding days in the 1990s. The shots here are from one of the trips I led through Greece and Turkey when I had my own company, Halcyon Tours.
My tours were focused on small groups, learning about the local culture, and staying in local-style places where my clients could get to know the people of an area. Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for wine-drinking on rooftops in places like Oia on Santorini too!
Back then, Oia was still somewhat unvisited. Many of the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt after the massive (7.5 magnitude) earthquake that hit the island in 1956.
In high season now, as many as 17,000 cruise ship tourists disembark on the island EACH DAY, with most of them crowding into the small town of Oia at sunset time.
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To be immersed in the kind of adventure it was possible to have in Europe before the awful crush of cruise-ship mass tourism, check out my forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour, available for pre-order now. (It will be published on January 28, 2025.)
Here’s a synopsis:
American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.
Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.
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