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Title: Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin ISBN: 0-312-42066-8 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: A disappointment
Comment: I bought this book to read as a sort of sequel to "A Short Histroy of Byzantium," and found it as dissappointing as "Byzantium" was satisfying. Perhaps I expected something else, but it's certainly no way to learn about Ottoman history. It glides through the first centuries of the Ottomans without any detail or coherence, then dwells on the fall of Constantinople with virtually no context. That's where I quit reading. I found the two previous reviews apt, but I wish I had read them before I bought the book. At least it was on remainder. This book is also a cautionary tale about relying on blurbs from a publication for which the author is a contributor.
Rating: 1
Summary: Surprised it's in print
Comment: Ceremony, the reviewer below, did a good job on this book. It is very disappointing. My thought while reading it was I was surprised it was in print. I was looking for a nonacademic history of the Ottoman Empire, sort of like the book that's described in the editorial blurbs above, that would be enjoyable to read and a good introduction to the subject. Instead, it's pretty much as ceremony described it. What was most irritating was the prose, which is maddeningly difficult to follow, know-it-all and filled with pointlessly arcane allusions. GO ELSEWHERE.
Rating: 1
Summary: Inaccurate title, unreadable book
Comment: This book bills itself as a "history of the Ottoman Empire," which it most emphatically is not. Instead, it sort of veers between being an informal history and a travel book, but it does neither of these things well. The author is not a historian, but a travel writer, and the book is structured as sort of a historical musing on certain places, loosely fit into an overall narrative of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. While this still makes the title inaccurate, it could have at least been interesting had it been done well. Unfortunately, the book suffers tremendously on several counts.
First, it's poorly written. The book tends to drift from topic to topic, sometimes between sentences, making it difficult to follow and destroying any narrative interest before it gets started. It's almost as though the author were documenting his thoughts as he stood at some historical point of interest. The prose itself attempts to be clever but doesn't succeed. Comments such as "the borders became soft as yoghurt, which the Tatars liked to eat" not only make the book impossible to take seriously, but offer the reader endless pointless details which are neither good history (since they are irrelevant) nor good travel observations (because they are not interesting).
Second, the historical accounts tend to read as a simple recounting of the events in question, without any real discussion of the political, social, or ethnographic context, and even so they skip wildly from event to event, with seemingly random elaboration on apparently minor details. The 1683 siege of Vienna, for example, reads like a compilation of people's diaries without regard for what facts actually contribute to an understanding of the events involved. As a history it's vague, incomplete, and completely useless. Often, the author simply spends paragraphs generalizing about things that the participants may or may not have thought, or how certainly places may have looked or may have made some people feel at the time. This doesn't belong in a history, and doesn't work as travel writing because for the most part it's boring and trivial and the prose is that of a smart-aleck.
The book is simply painful to read. Even a nine-hour overseas plane flight with no other reading matter available was insufficient to get me to complete it. The 75% I was able to get through, however, was remarkably consistent, so it's unlikely the remainder is different.
Avoid.
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Title: Ottoman Centuries by Lord Kinross ISBN: 0688080936 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 01 August, 1979 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin ISBN: 0805068848 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich ISBN: 0679772693 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey by Andrew Mango ISBN: 158567334X Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Stone Woman by Tariq Ali ISBN: 1859843646 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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