MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Geert Mak was born in Friesland in 1946 and is one of the Netherland's most prominent journalists. His works have been published to huge critical and popular acclaim. Philip Blom was born in Hamburg in 1970 and now works in London as a journalist, novelist and translator.
'Tis commonly said this city is very like Venice,' a widely travelled English visitor wrote of Amsterdam towards the end of the 17th century. 'For my part I believe Amsterdam to be much superior.' In this absorbing book, one of Holland's best-known journalists has traced the history of this captivating city and its people from its earliest days as a primitive settlement amidst a boggy marshland full of reeds and alder thickets. The story passes through the times of the prosperous 16th-century merchant depicted in a painting by Jacobszoon, sitting in his counting house with the profits of his trade on the table before him, to the horrors of the war and the fearful 'Hunger Winter' of 1945 when the empty houses of tens of thousands of deported Jews were plundered for firewood and 1600 Amsterdammers died of starvation in a single month. (Kirkus UK)
