Customer Reviews

Black Sea

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a bold and imaginative look at an area critical to the development of Western culture.Ascherson takes us on a remarkable tour through geography and history, and one comes away with much of the excitement of a real traveller. If the book stumbles on occasion I think it should be forgiven given the complexities that the author is willing to address (and the remarkably few stumbles that he has made. I particularly enjoyed Ascherson taking us more or less up to the present, as the spectre of modern environmental collapse joins the never-ending wars whose origins become more understandable after one has read this book. I wish it were longer, I wish there were more obvious references to take us further once we were done, but this is a real gem even if you never get east of Long Island Sound.

Part travel book, part history, part natural history, this is a miscellany of fascinating stories about a fascinating region woven together into a single, tight narrative. There's a great deal of learning lightly worn and tremendous technical skill involved in the organization and writing. Those reviewers who criticize it for not conforming to a standard template have a point, but what they're really complaining about is its originality.

The style is journalistic which makes it easy and enjoyable to read. The author can tell a story convincingly and he tells many. The subject matter is extremely exotic for an American reader. I have no way to know how reliable this author is as a historian. I am always suspicious of first-person journalistic history. Unlike other readers, I enjoyed the bits about Poland. But I think he is at his best in the lengthy ancient history parts. The best thing I can say about this book is it left me wanting to learn more.

What's up with all this discussion on Poland? Reading "Black Sea," one notices after a while that they're no longer reading about the Black Sea at all. Then you look in the index and see that more space is devoted to Poland than virtually any other single subject. Then you look in the author's cv and see that he's written extensively on Poland. If I'd wanted to read about Poland, I would have bought "Poland." (Otherwise, extraordinarily good.)

I have read many travelogues, for example ones by authors such as Lawrence Durrell, Rebecca West, and Jan Morris. I found this book to be of similar high quality. The author gives information in an enjoyable format that relates to his own personal travel in the region. His anecdotes on the retreat of the White Russian army from Novorossisk are interesting. The book gave me new information for an area that is often left out of other histories I have read about Byzantium and Eastern Europe. Information about the lucrative Venetian slave trade operating out of Tana was new to me and has never been mentioned in any other book about Venice or Byzantium that I have read. The story of the Pontine Greeks living in Trebizond and their "Katastrofe" exodus from there filled in gaps of knowledge for me. His discussion of Catherine the Great and her use of Cossacks and Jews to settle and develop the Don River region is fascinating. The book does dwell quite a bit on Polish involvement in Odessa, but his digression on the existence of a Polish and Lithuanian federation that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea was an esoteric and curious pleasure for me to read. I am passing the book along to several of my friends.

Ascherson's style is constantly engaging and provocative. He asks probing questions -- e.g. not only the genetic/ethnic question "who are these people?" but the often ignored further question, "who do these people think they are?". The answers diverge more often than one would expect. His coverage and command of 3000 years of jumbled ethnicities is impressive. My one complaint lies in his treatment of the point that forms his subtitle: that the Black Sea area is the "birthplace of civilization and barbarism". The essential point here is that one cannot participate in both "civilization" and "barbarism" at once. The support for this claim is not sufficient, and indeed seems to run counter to the theme of intermixture that animates the rest of the book. Nonetheless, the book is fantastic and well worth the read. We are deeply in Ascherson's debt for this wonderful work.

Black Sea is a gem of a book: it is a wonderfully written, sophisticated combination of travelogue and history by a fair-minded humanist. In my opinion, it stands with Claudio Magris's Danube as among the best books of its type. If you are interested in the Black Sea, I recommend this book. Even if you're not, however, I suspect that on trying Ascherson's prose, you will be... I have given five intelligent people I know copies as presents: all have enjoyed it immensely.

Great topic. High potential. Poor execution. Ascherson's peripatetic narration, including first person asides, is hard to follow. The lack of a map of the Black Sea is a bewildering (and frustrating) omission. If you are a reader who enjoys placing himself in a story, you may find yourself drifting and disappointed.

Read as preparation for cruise of Black Sea and found the book highly relevant and a good read. Thought clarity and usefulness would have been tremendously enhanced if Ascherson had included maps for each chapter showing locations being discussed as well as current and ancient place names.

What a splendid book! Ultimately it defies categorization, though to describe it as part history and part travelogue would not be seriously misleading. But THE BLACK SEA is not a comprehensive survey of the history and geopolitics of the region nor is it a guidebook. While nominally it is about the Black Sea, at a deeper level Neal Ascherson uses the histories of various peoples who have lived around the Black Sea over the past three millennia to explore the phenomena of nationalism and ethnic identity, the dichotomy of civilization vs. barbarianism, the genocidal horrors perpetrated by Russia and then the Soviet Union (and, to a slightly lesser extent, by Turkey), and much, much more. In the end, then, it is a meandering, provocative, and stunningly learned meditation on human political affairs as played out on the stage of the Black Sea.

Near the end of the book, Ascherson (a Scottish journalist, born in 1932) summarizes his Black Sea proscenium in the following terms:

"Human settlement around the Black Sea has a delicate, complex geology accumulated over three thousand years. But a geologist would not call this process simple sedimentation, as if each new influx of settlers neatly overlaid the previous culture. Instead, the heat of history has melted and folded peoples into one another's crevices, in unpredictable outcrops and striations. Every town and village is seamed with fault-lines. Every district displays a different veining of Greek and Turkic, Slav and Iranian, Caucasian and Kartvelian, Jewish and Armenian and Baltic and Germanic."

Along the way, the reader is exposed to a wide array of subjects, from the natural toxic anoxia of the Black Sea and the looming ecological crisis there, to the putsch against Gorbachev in the summer of 1991 (which occurred while Ascherson was in Crimea and then in Moscow), to various archaeological wonders and tragedies, to the efforts to develop an alphabet and an ethnic consciousness and identity for the Lazi people of coastal northeast Turkey. In addition, there are fascinating discussions of various peoples (such as the Karaim, Cossacks, Amazons, Sarmatians, and Pontic Greeks); exotic cities (such as Olbia, Odessa, Kerch, Trebizond, and Sukhum); and noteworthy historical figures (such as Herodotus, General Krasnov, Mikhail Lermontov, Adam Mickiewicz, and Karolina Sobanska). And all of it is told in a leisurely, literate way.

Ascherson's conclusion is not a happy one. His studies of Black Sea life incline him towards the view that "latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal." The book also teaches one that, while distrust and discord may be immortal, empires are not. This is the kind of book that is a good antidote for American hubris.

I have but two complaints. The first concerns maps. When I first started reading the book, I feared there were no maps whatsoever, but two of them suddenly appeared, unforeshadowed and unindexed, at pages 16 and 113. They are helpful, but they do not cover far too many of the places and geographical features discussed in the book. My second complaint is that the book is now sixteen years old, and its discussions of what in 1995 were the current situations in Ukrainian Crimea, Abkhazia, Turkey, the looming ecological disaster, etc. all cry for updated treatment. On the off chance that Neal Ascherson and his publisher(s) will notice, this reader hereby commits to purchasing a second or updated edition.