Customer Reviews

Lords of the Horizons (Bookclub)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

As has already been mentioned, "Lords of the Horizons" is not a true-blue history book. The history is confined mostly to its beginning and end; the core of the book is a lengthy, wide-ranging meditation on Ottoman culture at its peak, based largely on travel accounts and primary sources. I'm not surprised that Goodwin's other work includes travel literature; a travelogue is exactly what most of the book reads like.

Most of the book has no real chronological order; one can either see this as disorganized, or as intending to provide a kind of snapshot of Ottoman society. I prefer the latter; its jumpy nature is more than made up for by the author's superb language use: elegant and evocative, without being florid. I do agree however that the Armenian genocide, if not excused is indeed appallingly absent, and one wonders if he was just trying to speed things along by glossing over it.

All told though, I found this book to be a pleasure to read; I think it's something you're going to want to take some real time with, like a long country walk.

I give the author credit for trying to break out of the mold of "standard history" While I learned much about the Ottoman Empire, I recommend the reader begin with a fairly solid background in Eurasian and Central European history before diving into this work. If you read this book cold you might get lost, since the author is so familiar with his subject that he often fails to give extensive background on the hundreds of historical names and places he throws about.

The true heart of the book is what you will gain if you stick with it. Which is the look, feel, taste, and smell of the Ottoman Empire. These critical features are often missing from most "standard historical works". I really felt like I understood the culture and mindset of the Ottoman leaders after completing the book. The author has obviously spent a great deal of time in the area.

I agree with many reviewers that the title "history of the ottoman empire is misleading". "Impressions of the Ottomans Empire" would have been a better title.

While I am not sure the author's style will ever be widely accepted (academics will always attack his approach, and general readers might become lost and give up). I found it a worthwhile and enjoyable effort.

Goodwin models his dreamy, seemingly drifting style on what he percieves as the timeless feel of the the Sublime Porte, timeless and suspended in time. For this reason, the reader won't find a simple chronological ordering in the narrative, which drifts from age to age and back again, often refering to the same incident in many ways. It's an interesting tack to take in a book of history, but it's especially canny with reference to the Ottomans, who saw their civilization as the center of all time and thought. I've read it twice now, and gotten much from Goodwin's prose, which is elegant and erudite, and even occasionally gossipy. Goodwin is obviously in love with the whole top-heavy, inefficient mess, yet his love isn't blind, and he traces the flaws back as far as Suleyman. Perhaps "Lords of the Horizons" is not the easiest introduction to the subject, but for those who enjoy full-immersion, it's the most enchanting.

This book offers a stark contrast to Kinross' The Ottoman Centuries. Kinross' book is dry, stuffily pedantic, and laden with the details of obscure territorial skirmishes. While I learned the outlines of Ottoman history in Kinross, it was this book that gave me a true flavor for that vanished world - who the people were, why they acted the way they did, and how things appeared in the context of the time. It is a dazzling and confidently erudite tour of life then (without a whiff of pretension), and I was utterly engrossed from the minute I opened the book. Indeed, I was not intending to read this now, but I simply could not put it down when I looked at it out of curiosity.

This is not conventional history, but a flowing narrative that skips around in time; the subject matter of the chapters are organized as dense essays on military affairs, the populations within the Empire, and governance practices. The author went directly to the original sources of memoirs, diplomatic correspondence, and military communiques, always good for the beautiful, quirky anecdote. Many readers did not like this loose style, but I thought it made the book extremely fun and readable and vivid. Nonetheless, without Kinross, this would have been a far more difficult read and perhaps at many points incomprehensible. As such, the books are complementary and can be read together at great profit. But this book is a genuine literary masterpiece that left me in awe of the author's talent.

The story is incredible: from a small band of tough nomads in the steppes of Asia, several outstanding leaders created the first truly professional army since the Roman age. To the aristocratic knights in Europe - bound by chivalric conventions and a cumbersome military apparatus with untrustworthy mercenaries - the Turks appeared as a terrifying and unstoppable force of fierce and disciplined warriors. For 200 years, they advanced into the heart of Europe and conquered large portions of Asia Minor and North Africa with dreams of world domination that appeared all too credible to contemporary observers. The Ottomans also created a multi-ethnic society that for the times was tolerant and inclusive, did not seek to convert its subjects (they could tax non-Muslims afterall), and was more or less a meritocracy based on ability more than privilege.

Unfortunately, once the empiric expansion stopped, most of its virtues became deadly liabilities. During the Renaissance, the Ottoman Empire abruptly stalled and then became famously corrupt and decadent, after a series of leaders who can only be called military geniuses. Their administrative skills never advanced beyond the phenomenally innovative organization of military camps to reinvent the governance of Ottoman society. First, without the pillage income from continual conquest, revenues needed to be raised to pay the standing army. The responsibility for this fell to regional governors, who preyed upon local residents, severely undermining the authority of the state while creating a kind of aristocracy of privilege for themselves (and hence mediocrity). Second, the elite Janisseries - like the Praetorian guard of the Romans - realized the true extent of their power, and became corrupted and dangerous power brokers in Istanbul. Third, the command power of the Sultan, so useful in war, blocked the diffusion of power to a professional administrative caste, which remained under-developed into the 19th C. Effective pashas came and went, often strangled by the bowstring for failure, but they did not establish schools to train their successors. Fourth, the medieval mentality - an acceptance of fate that enabled Ottoman warriors to rush into battle with the fearlessness of religious true believers - gradually gave way to personal caution, as exemplified by the defensive behavior of its leaders. Fifth, the quality of the hereditary monarchic line declined after Suleyman the Magnificent, in large part because the Sultan's sons were more of less imprisoned in the Harem - a parallel universe of pleasure and bizarre political machination - rather than gaining experience as governors of provinces (as they had in the empire's early cneturies). Interestingly, none of the above issues became dead end problems in Europe, whose societies were evolving in some ways to explicitly to resolve them. Finally, the forces of nationalism created centrifugal forces that doomed the ancient mores that made such a vast, eclectic society possible, which I believe still stands as an example towards which we might strive in new ways in the current global society that is in formation.

This is one of those books that can fill the reader with wonder at the sweep of history and human possibility. It has turned my interest in Turkish history into an inspiration that will sustain me for the rest of my life. Recommended with the greatest enthusiasm. Indeed, contemporary Turkey remains one of the most important political experiments on the planet in our current crisis of civilization. It is astonishing that so few Americans understand this.

This book bills itself as a "history of the Ottoman Empire," which it most emphatically is not. Instead, it sort of veers between being an informal history and a travel book, but it does neither of these things well. The author is not a historian, but a travel writer, and the book is structured as sort of a historical musing on certain places, loosely fit into an overall narrative of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. While this still makes the title inaccurate, it could have at least been interesting had it been done well. Unfortunately, the book suffers tremendously on several counts.

First, it's poorly written. The book tends to drift from topic to topic, sometimes between sentences, making it difficult to follow and destroying any narrative interest before it gets started. It's almost as though the author were documenting his thoughts as he stood at some historical point of interest. The prose itself attempts to be clever but doesn't succeed. Comments such as "the borders became soft as yoghurt, which the Tatars liked to eat" not only make the book impossible to take seriously, but offer the reader endless pointless details which are neither good history (since they are irrelevant) nor good travel observations (because they are not interesting).

Second, the historical accounts tend to read as a simple recounting of the events in question, without any real discussion of the political, social, or ethnographic context, and even so they skip wildly from event to event, with seemingly random elaboration on apparently minor details. The 1683 siege of Vienna, for example, reads like a compilation of people's diaries without regard for what facts actually contribute to an understanding of the events involved. As a history it's vague, incomplete, and completely useless. Often, the author simply spends paragraphs generalizing about things that the participants may or may not have thought, or how certainly places may have looked or may have made some people feel at the time. This doesn't belong in a history, and doesn't work as travel writing because for the most part it's boring and trivial and the prose is that of a smart-aleck.

The book is simply painful to read. Even a nine-hour overseas plane flight with no other reading matter available was insufficient to get me to complete it. The 75% I was able to get through, however, was remarkably consistent, so it's unlikely the remainder is different.

Avoid.

Here is a book of history where the reader feels the author truly loves the subject. The book covers the history of the Ottomans from the beginnings before the capture of Constantinople through to the end of the empire in the early 1900s. The author does not feel the compulsion to cram every fact he has unearthed into the narrative, he has the talent of telling history as a story, keeps it moving, interesting, at times amusing, with a sense of time and place that carries the reader along. The book comes off at the perfect length and depth to tell the whole history without being bogged down. If you have any interest in the history of the Ottomans this book is an excellent choice.
A very good author with a fascinating subject= a great book.

This is the second book I have read on the Ottomans (the first was Lord Kinross' "The Ottoman Centuries"). As stated by a reviewer below, this book is incorrect in its claim to be a history of the Ottoman Empire. It is mostly a series of anecdotes (often in no particular chronological order) which I assume are meant to reveal deep hidden truths about the nature of the Ottomans.

The chronological jumping can be really frustrating; I often found myself referring back to the list of Sultans at the end (there's a chronology too but it's pretty sparse) just to figure out about where in time we were at the moment.

The author often moves from one point to another without really bothering to show how they relate. I give as an example the first three pages of Part 3, Chapter 1. Herein we move, without any pretense at a transition, from a description of a ludicrously overstocked Ottoman fortress (6,531 shovels for 100 men) to a description of Ottoman poetry, to an account of the people of Jerusalem catching flies and putting them on a string to be counted, to the tendency of Ottoman officials and sultans to hoard up money, to a paragraph which touches on the naval defeat at Lepanto before referring to a sultan who sewed his wives up in bags and threw them into the Bosphorus.

The reforms of the 19th century are glossed over; the Ottoman Parliament is referred to once in passing without it ever being mentioned how it came to be (a pretty big deal in what once was an absolute monarchy!) or how it was suspended under Abdulhamit II and later reinstated.

To be fair, many of the anecdotes presented in this book are true gems. But one gets the feeling that the author has simply done a lot of reading from primary sources on the Ottomans and their empire and then put his favorite bits together piecemeal, a great heap of nonsequiters, interspersed with his mediocre prose. The result is frankly tiresome.

Jason Goodwin seems never to have been warned of the run-on sentence.

In scope and topic, this book would be exactly what I wanted. Except it isn't. Goodwin can't write.

It's his interminable sentences that throw Goodwin himself, dragging us poor readers, far off the trail of a good story. He seems to have done his research. 'Twould be nice if he'd share it more clearly with the rest of us.

The typical sentence here runs some three dozen words. Six to eight lines. A mess of incomplete clauses which ought be paragraphs or more.

Take for example the sentence where Goodwin describes 1) fortresses, marketplace, mosque and homestead, 2) the discussions of academics, and 3) the image of incoming riders, as well as, 4) their horses. The reader's image buffer is well past full when she's finally are blessed with a period. Yet the author still has given no hint on the topic of the (3/4-page) paragraph to come.

I'm still looking for a readable book on the Ottoman Empire. Goodwin might try Woodward's treatment of the Iraq War, after he rereads Strunk and White six or eight times.

Despite the assertions below, it is not so hard to follow - and quite delectable in its choice of anecdotes as it is humorous. Lords of the Horizons does not claim to be ''the history'', rather ''a history'' - and not a dry textbook - which the above critiques' seem to have missed. For example, the chapters are broken into stages such as Origins, The Balkans, The Siege, The Centre, War, Order, Rhythms etc.

In regards to it being disconnected, Goodwin's book is purposefully written on subjects, rather than following a linear path - like one of his chapters, Turkish Time, which imparts to Ottoman time being circular, not linear; and it is also where the title of the book is related to. The other comment on the prose is surprising harsh, if not a misunderstanding. I cannot understand how, mostly, one would not be able to catch on to its intentional revelry and musings! Goodwin has a love for the Turkish past, and has written the book in an upbeat, sprightly way.

The passage, mis-quoted, actually reads:

''They [The nomad Turks] were drawn into the rhino's head of Anatolia by the backwash of declining Byzantine power: after the battle of Manzikert in 1071 the eastern borders of Byzantium were soft as yoghurt, which the nomads like to eat. They were pushed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, who left devastation in their wake. Pushed or pulled, they always moved west.''

Now, what is so 'impossible' or 'pointless' about that?

Ottoman history is fascinating and extremely difficult to grasp. For one thing the chronology is difficult and my grasp of history is Eurocentric and Ottoman history doesn't fit easily. And the Sultans are unfamiliar. This book is interesting in the way it presents the Ottoman Empire. There is no real ordering of events. The author jumps from time to time and back again. It becomes difficult to insert it into a European framework, and that frame is quite important as the Ottomans interfaced with Europe constantly throughout their history. The book does give a feel for the place. It would help to be British to understand the book. The authors idiom and sentance structure are definitely not US reader friendly.