Istanbul’s city walls become the backdrop to compelling human stories of survival and resistance.
A revelatory exploration of the ancient city’s four miles of land walls, which enclose the entire western side of its peninsula.
Turkey correspondent for the London Times for six years in the 2010s, Christie-Miller is a knowledgeable and ideal guide to this terrain. Chapters of his sprawling investigation into centuries of Turkish and Ottoman history alternate with passages grounded in contemporary Istanbul and the vibrant if impoverished neighborhoods that surround its crumbling walls, complete with towers still standing, if partly in ruins. These walls were built by the Byzantines as fortifications, protecting their imperial capital from invasions for a millennium. Christie-Miller centers his history on two momentous events: the siege and capture of the city, then named Constantinople, by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1453, and the precipitous rise to power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian, Islamist-rooted AK Party in 2002. We see how this history has a direct impact on ordinary Turkish citizens: a family turned out of its ancestral home as the urban landscape is razed for residential developments, for example, or a heroin addict whose precarious recovery leads to his work as a counselor in a live-in rehab clinic. We learn how redevelopment projects shut down factories and docks in the former industrial zone on the city’s Golden Horn, to be replaced by tourist-friendly cafés and beachfront. A Roma community is displaced by luxury villas. It’s a very urban history, appropriate since the city’s name comes from the medieval Greek phrase stin polin, “in/at/to the city.” Throughout the book, Istanbul’s storied past and tumultuous present coexist along miles of the historic walls, now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Istanbul’s city walls become the backdrop to compelling human stories of survival and resistance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367344
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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