Lords of the : A History of the Ottoman Empire

click here for more details, find new or used items	Jason Goodwin Our price £6.99 (£8.99) New from £4.33 Used from £3.99 Pages: 368 (Paperback) ISBN: 0099994003 Pub: Vintage Pub date: 1999-03-04 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 26494

Reader Reviews:

Informative but incredibly dry (13/15 people found this helpful)

This book was quite informative, but exremely dry. I am an absolute history freak and read history books constantly. This is one of the few that I was actually tempted to put down and never pick up again. I persevered to the end, but didn`t find it rewarding.

A haphazard miscellany (2/3 people found this helpful)

This book disappointed me. Trailed as a history, I expected something more robust than what seemed to me to be a collection of jottings from the author's limited library.

To be fair to him, Jason Goodwin gives us the list of books he's read and clearly he has noted down little snippets he has enjoyed in many of them. Lady Mary Wortley for instance contributes a lot of her views of 18th century Istanbul. But this collection lacks substance and completeness and the reader is left with the feeling of having had a lot of appetisers but no main course on which to chew.

Disappointing too are the appendices inserted no doubt to give a semblance of authority to the book. A long list of Sultans is incompletely drawn up, leaving details of the last few sultans unfinished. The dates in the list bizarrely don't entirely match the dates used in the text of the chapters of the book. Occasionally, the author forgets what he has written, only to write the same story very slightly differently on the following page.

For the newcomer to Turkish politics (and that of the Ottoman period), this book could be helpful, as long as they don't try to expect accuracy in all that they have read. If only it were quite a lot shorter, though, to justify the effort of reading what is at best an incomplete taster for a complex political story.

Disappointing (13/14 people found this helpful)

I bought this book to read on my recent trip to Turkey, to help give me some historical context, but I was sorely disappointed.

I know a little bit of history about a lot of places as well has having a fairly detailed knowledge of some subjects (I have a history degree) but I knew very little about Turkey so I hoped that this book would give me a quick overview.

Unfortunately the structure of the book didn't give me any kind of historical perspective; it didn't really talk about events or the causes of events. I wanted to understand how the Turks came to form the Ottoman empire, how they held it together. I wanted to understand the personalities of its rulers and their impact on events so that when I saw their portraits in the Topkapi Palace I had some appreciation of who they actually were.

In short, it is not a history book as such, more a collection of cultural and historical snapshots. I felt that to really get the best out of this book the reader would need to have a fairly good basic grounding in Ottoman history. Sadly, I still don't!

A collection of essays rather than a history book (5/6 people found this helpful)

The book is written by a journalist who apparantly knows his subject well. However, somehow he fails to make the story interesting and readable. The book consists of essays on various topics (e.g. the palace, order, cities, the sea, the cage etc), it does not have a chronological backbone. I got the impression that the book is written in superficial style that is sorrily so often used by journalists...

No,No,No. (4/7 people found this helpful)

This book seems to have been written with the assumption that the reader already knows most of the history of the Ottoman Empire,and the Author is simply embellishing certain episodes and incidents.It doesnt read like a conventional History book,more like a collection of anecdotes and gossip.After a while the style of the book becomes tedious and ultimately annoying.No attempt is made to explain exactly HOW a small tribe of nomads was able to conquer such a vast Empire in such a short period of time.In short,not so much Lord of the Horizons as Lord of the small portions.

Similar Products

The Snake Stone ('Yashim the Eunuch' Mystery)

The Bellini Card ('Yashim the Eunuch' Mystery)

Revelation (Shardlake)

The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire

The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels Through India and China in Search of Tea

Categories

Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories: