The book combines memoir, history, anecdote and reportage on subjects as diverse as the differences between the sex lives of former East and West Berliners to the present-day hidden quirks of the city.

David Hugh Smith, for The Christian Science Monitor praised Berlin Now as "engrossing" writing that Schneider deserves plaudits.

However, Smith did criticise how "Schneider veers alarmingly off course with chapters not so much about Berlin but about overarching German issues – about, for example, the Stasi, and immigration.

Derbyshire wrote that Schneider's "representation of ethnic minorities in Berlin Now is strictly black-and-white—as either victims or perpetrators of crimes, rarely active agents....Instead of a depiction of a diverse and fast-evolving minority making in-roads into the city’s intellectual, cultural, and business life, what Schneider gives us is an attack on Muslims."

"[2] In The New York Times Nicholas Kulish writes that "Schneider seeks to explain why the city became 'the capital of creative people from around the world today.'"