Rating: 
Summary: Takes a lot of patients to read this book
Review: After a couple of false starts I was able to finally finish this book. I read it because I had seen "Cabaret" the movie and the play. I have not seen the play "I am a Camera" by Erik Von Deutten. However I expected a faster moving story and really had to drudge through this. There are moments that you can identify with. However for the most part you feel like a third party. You may not want to identify with some of the characters.
Whatever is supposed to make this book good is lost in the details. Be sure to look at the Amazon inside samples and actually try reading them.
Well I read it but I am not sure I want to read anymore of his book. I feel a little cheated when one describes his use of English and the book is over before you find this. I feel a little embarrassed at not liking it with the praise it receives, but I guess you can not like them all.
Rating: 
Summary: Great stories!
Review: As another reviewer implies, Christopher Isherwood is a master of prose. He succiently and subtlely captures a time, places and people in 1930's Berlin. There are some wonderful characters including Sally Bowles, who is the model for stage version of Cabaret. Indeed, Isherwood, himself, in a forward to this book, tells us what happens when he meets Juliet Harris (?), who first plays Bowles on stage around 1959.This is very easy to read; the events are a bit disheartening at times and the characters aren't always admirable--but they're very true to life. The reader, too, really gets a picture of how German people felt during the rise of Nazism. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Fun, tragic, fictional, and true.
Review: Based on Isherwood's real experiences in Berlin, the two novels in Berlin stories both follow the same pattern: they get you interested, and draw you into a fun world, and then they turn tragic . . . and the power of the last twenty pages is surprising.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: Berlin Stories is a wonderful book. I am reading it again it's so good!!!!!!! The writing is absolutely impeccable. Though I read it because of my obsession with the musical "Cabaret", I found it to be a great book in its own right. I think Isherwood would be proud of the current Broadway version of "Cabaret". I don't know what else to say:)
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: Berlin Stories is a wonderful book. I am reading it again it's so good!!!!!!! The writing is absolutely impeccable. Though I read it because of my obsession with the musical "Cabaret", I found it to be a great book in its own right. I think Isherwood would be proud of the current Broadway version of "Cabaret". I don't know what else to say:)
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: Berlin Stories is a wonderful book. I am reading it again it's so good!!!!!!! The writing is absolutely impeccable. Though I read it because of my obsession with the musical "Cabaret", I found it to be a great book in its own right. I think Isherwood would be proud of the current Broadway version of "Cabaret". I don't know what else to say:)
Rating:
Summary: The bohemia of Berlin before the Nazi menace
Review: Between 1929 and 1933 Isherwood lived in Berlin and, after returning in London, he wrote the novel and the autobiographical sketches that make up this volume. Just how autobiographical these stories might be is left to the reader's imagination, of course, but they seemed to be based on German eccentrics whom the author knew and whom the reader will be unable to forget. The novel that opens the book, "The Last of Mr. Norris" (published in 1935 in England as "Mr. Norris Changes Trains"), is a somewhat comic portrayal of a bumbling, vain double agent who wears an ill-fitting wig and operates in the sleazy underworld contested by Communist idealists and Nazi thugs. The narrator, William Bradshaw, is a British expatriate tutoring English to young Germans in Berlin--someone, in other words, a lot like Isherwood himself. He encounters Norris on a train, and they initiate an often bizarre, always uneasy, on-again, off-again friendship that propels them through drunken nights in sleazy pubs and dangerous rendezvous at Swiss ski resorts. In the second half of the book, "Goodbye to Berlin" (published in 1939), Isherwood drops the alter-ego and presents himself as the narrator. Character sketches alternate with "diary entries" and feature an overlapping cast, and some of the minor figures from "Mr. Norris" make important cameos. The most famous story is "Sally Bowles," which later became John Van Druten's play "I Am a Camera" and inspired the musical "Cabaret." Equally notable, however, is the homoerotic "On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931)," which recounts Isherwood living in a lakeside cabin with the effete, insecure Peter and the athletic, sexually ambivalent Otto, whose Nordic beauty seems transmigrated from an Aryan Youth poster. Otto appears again in a subsequent section called "The Nowaks," about Isherwood's schizophrenic life while sharing a crowded attic apartment with Otto's dysfunctional family. The final sketch, "The Landauers," concerns Bernhard, the presumed heir of a wealthy Jewish family who operate a Berlin department store. Bernhard's airy cynicism and adopted Eastern spiritualism thwart his business sense and ill-prepare him for the political dangers overtaking the country. Both "Mr. Norris" and "Goodbye to Berlin" share a comic esprit eventually overwhelmed by the gravity of the Nazi menace. Together, these stories are an ode to the carefree bohemians, flappers, intellectuals, and misfits who enlivened Berlin before they were swept away by Hitler and his bullying monsters.
Rating:
Summary: Long Live Christopher Isherwood
Review: Christopher Isherwood is the best author ever. His writing style is very simple in a way that you just get what he's tlaking about. I love that his stories are about his life, although some of it he exagerrates or changes...bu it makes a great story! Sometimes I find myself laughing out loud while reading his books because he write about some pretty funny situations in such a blunt way.
How can I not love THIS story? It's CABARET-related! (That's how I foudn out about him!)
Rating: 
Summary: Good and Evil in the Wind
Review: I don't know what to make of this book. It's a bit of a bore. This is due in part to the lack of a smooth narrative flow and its inexorable amount of difficult passages the reader must drudge through. Instead of being a pleasure to read it becomes a task. The book entices you with its characters but then makes you suffer to find fruition. It is still interesting however.
Rating:
Summary: Good and Evil in the Wind
Review: I don�t know what to make of this book. It�s a bit of a bore. This is due in part to the lack of a smooth narrative flow and its inexorable amount of difficult passages the reader must drudge through. Instead of being a pleasure to read it becomes a task. The book entices you with its characters but then makes you suffer to find fruition. It is still interesting however.
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