Homer's Travels: Book: Hugh Pope's "Sons Of The Conquerors"

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Book: Hugh Pope's "Sons Of The Conquerors"

I always read non-fiction books slower than fiction.  I wonder why that is.  It was no different for my latest read, Huge Pope's "Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World".

I wanted a book that would fill in a hole I had in my history education, the Ottoman Turks.  This is not the book for that, unfortunately.  This isn't the books fault.  I was just careless in researching the book before I bought it.  The book covers the Turkic world after the breakup of the Soviet Union.  While there is some history sprinkled in the mix, most of the book covers the last twenty to thirty years.  I learned a bit about the modern Turkic world but I will have to go somewhere else for the Ottoman Empire.

Pope is a journalist who has lived and traveled extensively in what is now the Turkic world of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and various -istans most people know very little about or, sadly, care about.  The author's writing style is ... well ... that of a journalist.  Each chapter covers a single country (though there are several chapters per country) and has the distinct feel of a newspaper article.  This is okay, I guess, but the problem is that he jumps from one country to the next, one time period to another, in a very haphazard way.  I would have preferred a more chronological and geographically coherent ordering of the chapters.  But that's just me.

If you are interested in the modern Turkish world and don't mind jumping around a bit, then I would mildly recomend this book.

3 comments:

  1. Your last sentence cracked me up-I was like- "Hey I'm pretty bouncy" and then you said "mildly recommend" . :D So I probably won't read it, but just ask you random questions in the future. ;)

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  2. Miss McC: My last sentence was a mess and I have corrected it.

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  3. still hysterical that you mildly recommend it. I'll think I'll wait for a stronger recommendation!

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