The more we know about the Ottomans, the more easily comprehensible the subsequent history of the region they ruled becomes....
Readable survey of one of the world’s great empires.
Founded by the Turkoman Emir Osman, who had dreamed that he was destined to do so, the Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years and came to incorporate much of western Asia, northeastern Africa and southeastern Europe. Yet, as British historian Finkel tells it in her U.S. debut, though the dominion may have been vast, it was also tenuous. The Ottomans conquered most of the Arabian peninsula, for instance, but for some reason could never take control of the rich province of Yemen, “singularly failing to subdue it” over the course of a century. They were more effective closer to home, forging an empire by gathering rural Anatolians of many ethnicities and religions and moving them into Istanbul. They similarly pacified the countryside, establishing tight control over the comings and goings of the citizenry. In its more tranquil moments, the Ottoman Empire was an oasis of learning, with much attention given to pleasures and vices. (Its rulers, Finkel writes, appreciated that tobacco and alcohol served “as a means of raising ready cash.”) When bellicose, it was something to fear, as the good citizens of Austro-Hungary and various Balkan principalities understood. The empire dwindled in the 18th and early-19th centuries, as Russia seized the Crimea, and Greece gained independence; it disintegrated rapidly in the early-20th century with the collapse of the Central Powers with which the last Ottomans had allied themselves. Finkel’s text is a satisfying blend of narrative history, anecdote and character study (featuring such players as “Fairskinned Bosnian” Suleyman Agha and Chief Black Eunuch Yusuf Agha). Her careful but brief discussion of the Armenian genocide, however, may not please readers with a stake in either side of the issue.
The more we know about the Ottomans, the more easily comprehensible the subsequent history of the region they ruled becomes. Finkel’s study makes a useful contribution.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-02396-7
Page Count: 660
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones— wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)—but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness—and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)—``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record—slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42075-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
The story of an Israeli Jew's experiences as a mole inside Germany's radical right. In September 1992 Svoray was an out-of-work fortune hunter and sometimes journalist searching Germany for diamonds stashed and then lost by an American GI 37 years before. By accident, this quixotic hunt led Svoray to an aging neo-Nazi who took a liking to him and became his conduit to the German far right: unrepentant Nazis from the Third Reich, murderous young skinheads, and modern right-wing ideologues and politicians. Svoray forgot the diamonds and became an investigator for the Los Angelesbased Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization established to combat anti- Semitism. Somehow, the neo-Nazis failed to penetrate Svoray's flimsy cover as a reporter for a nonexistent right-wing American publication and an advance man for a wealthy American looking to contribute to neo-Nazi movements. Further, Svoray managed to talk his way into right-wing strongholds in heavily accented English. Svoray and Taylor (A Necessary End, p. 131) tell the story of the Israeli's 18 months among the neo-Nazis. It is a fascinating, frightening, and revealing account, but one that is also badly flawed by the decision to write the book in the third person with Svoray as the hero/protagonist. The device turns In Hitler's Shadow into a tale of high adventure, complete with narrow escapes and moments of high danger, rather than investigative journalism. Svoray gathered important information about a movement that many critics charge has been paid insufficient attention by the German government, and the wide news coverage given Svoray's investigation may have contributed to Germany's recent crackdowns against neo- Nazis. (HBO will bradcast a tie-in movie in 1995.) An imperfect but riveting inside view of Germany's neo-Nazi movement and the dangers it presents. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47284-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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