Geoffrey Pyke was one of the twentieth century's most brilliant eccentrics -- a mad genius who persuaded FDR and Churchill to build giant aircraft carriers out of ice, a misfit wizard who founded and funded progressive education in Great Britain by seizing control of a third of the world supply of tin, and a mysterious impoverished hermit who spent years living on herring and broken cookies donated by a local bakery. But in 1914, Pyke was just another Cambridge teenager who was brilliant at everything except his studies. Too undisciplined and unhealthy to join the military, he pitched a wild notion to a London newspaper editor: why not make him their war correspondent in Berlin? The editor called the boy's bluff, and Pyke made his way across Europe on little more than a false passport, a pretty good German accent, and sheer chutzpah.
And so begins an odyssey into the heart of wartime Berlin, and a plunge into a harrowing year of solitary confinement and imprisonment at Ruhleben, a horsetrack-turned-internment camp that is now considered the model for Germany's concentration camps. Starving and freezing, British prisoners housed in Ruhleben's horse stables tried to recreate productions of The Mikado from memory, and held university classes in the face of disease and a tyrannical commandant. After an escape in broad daylight, and a perilous dash across the German countryside to the Dutch border, Pyke returned home at the age of 20 to write To Ruhleben -- And Back, the first eyewitness account of a German concentration camp.
Lost to obscurity for over eighty years, his extraordinary book is a college student's sharp-tongued travelogue, a journey of hair-breadth escapes behind enemy lines, a sober meditation on imprisonment and escape and, as Pyke intended, a ripping yarn.
"The war will produce few books of more absorbing interest than this one."
-New York Times
"A very fine story of a great and perilous adventure."
-The Times (London)
"The Collins Library, devoted to the rediscovery of forgotten beauties and oddities of literature [is] potentially the most exciting new imprint since the launch of New York Review Books."
-The Village Voice
