|
|
|
|
||
|
HELP | |
|
  $18.95
New Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
This title in other formats:Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkeyby Bruce Clark
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited. In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities. Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community. Review:Clark presents a nicely written, journalistic narrative history of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed WW I. He discusses in an engaging and often poignant style the deportation of the nearly two million citizens--Orthodox Christians from Turkey and Muslims from Greece--that was overseen by a recently formulated international community and implemented by the postwar Turkish and Greek governments. Clark does an excellent job of bringing readers into the story at the levels of both what he calls "high politics" and the "lives of ordinary people." Review:The story of this 'population exchange' and its ramifications is evocatively told by Bruce Clark...[He] blends the personal histories of refugees and their descendants with an astute account of the larger diplomatic forces that shaped their lives...The scars of this population exchange are still visible in Greece and Turkey today--in ruined and abandoned churches and mosques, and also in familial ties that span the Aegean...Clark warns us that ethnic resettlement, even with a transparent veneer of respectability bestowed by the international community, is a tragedy with repercussions that last long after families are transplanted and borders redrawn. Review:Clark's book is a timely reminder not only of man's inhumanity to man, and of our duty to avoid it, but also of the fact that throughout most of modern history it was considered right and natural that war and conflict should be ended by treaty, and that unless and until someone was able and willing to reverse the situation on the ground, the treaty would normally follow the maxim 'what you have you hold' (uti possidetis). While making explicit the price that had to be paid for peace between Greece and Turkey. Bruce Clark does not shirk from what he calls 'a truth that is awkward from a liberal, modern point of view'--the fact that the price was not wasted. He has written a book that can be read, not with pleasure, but with interest, and certainly with profit. Review:A wise new book...Clark is particularly good on the human cost of the exchange, which he illustrates with first-hand testimony, much of it new, of almost unbearable poignancy. Review:Clark treats brilliantly both the macrohistory of the war and diplomacy leading to the expulsions and the several local histories of those different communities uprooted in order to become Turks living in Turkey and Greeks living in Greece. Review:In this marvellous book, Bruce Clark contrives to interleaf the macro (or megalo) story with the micro one. He presents a lucid summary of the events that led to this statesponsored deportation...Clark has a real sympathy for his subjects as well as his subject, he has a true facility in Greek dialects and he manages to evoke a genuine melancholy while avoiding the sentimental...Bruce Clark's book furnishes ghostly and ghastly evidence that for all its difficulties this policy is probably more practical as well as more ethical. I must add that he writes in that almost invisibly good and clear English that I thought had begun to die out of our journalism. Review:[A] thoughtful and deeply moving book. Review:A compellingly educational, yet shocking read. Review:Clark's refugees are a valuable corrective to the policymakers' fondness for organizing other people's lives, and why the tinge of nostalgia which permeates this lucid analysis offers its own message for the future. Review:Absorbing and thorough...Clark's history is welcome for shedding light upon this 'giant divorce settlement,' an event that is barely known beyond the Aegean, largely because its architects were quick to close the book on a pitiless exercise in political expediency...With Turkey's ongoing interest in joining an insistently multicultural European Union, and the current state of relations between Muslims and the West, Twice a Strangercannot fail to ring with topical resonance...This is a welcome and readable account of what it means to be twice a stranger: both in the place where you were born and in the place where you grow old. Review:Twice a Strangernever loses sight of the painful experience of losing homes and homelands. Clark skilfully presents many poignant firsthand accounts of the population exchange. He draws on both his own interviews with Greeks and Turks and work by local historians such as Iskender Özsoy, a journalist from the town of Tuzla on the Sea of Marmara. Özsoy regrets that his work did not start even sooner; but Clark, Özsoy, and others fortunately did not wait until it was too late altogether. Clark, for his part, has compiled a remarkable body of testimony about the heavy human cost of forced migration...Twice a Strangeris a fascinating book that should be read. Review:At the conclusion of a bloody war in 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a "population exchange" that sent over a million Turkish Orthodox Christians to Greece and nearly half a million Greek Muslims to Turkey. The result, argues this absorbing study, was a humanitarian nightmare that sheds light on the conundrums of religion, ethnicity and identity in the modern age...Clark contends that the mass expulsions were a model for similar, sometimes de facto, transfers after WWII in Europe, India and Palestine; his gripping, sensitive history highlights the costs of such expedient policies. About the AuthorBruce Clarkis the international security editor of The Economist. He was formerly diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Timesand ReutersAthens correspondent. Table of Contents
What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
Other books you might like
Related Aisles
| ||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
Don't Miss
