Rebecca Donner on “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days”

Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “All the Frequent Troubles of our Days.” The story of Donner's great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of the largest underground resistance group to Hitler in the 1930s and 40s, All the Frequent Troubles is both an intimate portrait of a courageous young woman and also the story of how a charismatic demagogue captured a country. Donner shares Mildred's story and also talks about the dogged scholarly research that helped her piece together her aunt's amazing life.

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