The Telegraph Best Books of 2015 So Far
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Rogan offers an intricately worked but very readable account of a theocracys demise.”
Economist
[An] assured account.... The book stands alongside the best histories. Mr. Rogan ably weaves the thinking and doings of the politicians and generals with their impact on the soldiers and civilian populations. He sketches many revealing vignettes.”
New Yorker
This engrossing history unfolds in the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War, capturing the complex array of battles, brutalities, and alliances that brought down the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire.... Rogan argues that the empires ultimate demise was the result not of losing the war but of a clumsily negotiated peace. His balanced narrative unearths many seeds of current conflicts.”
Mark Mazower, Financial Times
[A] remarkably readable, judicious and well-researched account of the Ottoman war in Anatolia and the Arab provinces. The Fall of the Ottomans is especially good on showing the fighting across multiple fronts and from both sides of the lines, and it draws effectively upon the papers, memoirs and diaries of soldiers and civilians.”
New York Times Book Review
[An] intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracys demise.... Gripping sections describe the British-led advance on Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy citys capture in time for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the ingenuity of Britains tactics.”
Max Hastings, Sunday Times (UK)
Rogan has written an impressively sound and fair-minded account of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.”
Spectator (UK)
[A] masterly history of the Ottoman empire in its final years.... Eugene Rogan has written a meticulously researched, panoramic and engrossing history. The book is essential reading for understanding the evolution of the modern Middle East and the root causes of nearly all the conflicts that now plague the area. The Fall of the Ottomans is an altogether splendid work of historical writing.”
New York Review of Books
Admirable and thoroughly researched.... A comprehensive history of World War I in the Middle East.”
The Times (UK)
[A] comprehensive, lucid and revealing history.... This book will surely become the definitive history of the war.”
Guardian (UK)
Compared to the western front, the Middle East was a sideshow for all but those who called it home. Rogan has rightly put these Turks, Armenians and Arabs at the centre of his account.”
Daily Beast
The Fall of the Ottomans is a remarkably lucid and accessible work of history.... [Rogan] seems equally at home explaining the parameters of Ottoman grand strategy and the tensions of the British-Arab Alliance as he is at conjuring up the unique challenges of maneuver warfare in the Sinai and Palestine, or the brutal stalemate in the Gallipoli trenches. Telling quotations from diplomats, field commanders, and ordinary soldiers of all the combatants lend the narrative a powerful sense of immediacy.”
Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog
A deluge of books came out last year to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. These were two of the best. These sweeping, well-researched books cover similar ground, but present their accounts with very different points of emphasis and narrative styles.”
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
[A] timely and capacious history which leaves the over-trodden Flanders mud and football truces in favor of the various campaigns at best imperfectly understood, at worst woefully unfamiliar which the Allies waged in the Middle East. Its in the former Ottoman lands, traumatised by war, sectarianism and repression, that the legacies of the Great War continue to be grievously felt.... Heres a book whose instructive geopolitical relevance should be immediately apparent.... [A] compelling and brilliant book.”
Washington Independent Review of Books
[A] fresh and meticulous portrait of the Ottoman Empire: modern and modernizing, then declining, and eventually kaput.”
Middle East Policy
[A] brilliant book that combines the academic rigor one expects from a serious work of history and a fluid writing style that makes it an enjoyable read.... The Fall of the Ottomans offers a comprehensive history of one of the most tumultuous and least understood fronts of the Great War.... Rogans narrative is both precise and unhurried, while at the same time capturing the urgency and drama of events on the ground.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mr. Rogans presentation of a crucial part of that history, Turkeys role in the First World War, is a painless, colorful and pleasurable means of getting a decent hold on it.... This book sets out history that is definitely worth mastering to help understand the present.”
Open Letters Monthly
Fiercely readable.... In a series of fast-moving and very skillfully-written chapters, Rogan describes in great detail the politics and personalities of the Ottoman side of WWI.”
Independent (UK)
Personal stories drawn from diaries and memoirs enliven Eugene Rogans satisfyingly straightforward narrative.”
Observer
Readers of his previous work, The Arabs, will know how comfortably [Eugene Rogan] handles multiple themes, ambitious narratives and a crowd of characters.... Even the familiar has resonance, such as General Maudes insistence to the battered people of Baghdad that his soldiers were liberators.... That resonance adds relevance to this thorough and absorbing book, because it reminds us that the postwar Middle East settlements were as flawed as the conditions imposed on Germany, and that in turn explains why the land they fought over then is still being contested today.”
Washington Times
[Rogans] account is geopolitical and military writing at its best taut, anecdotal and extraordinarily researched. A tangled story, to be sure, one that both commands and rewards the readers attention.”
The National (Dubai)
[A] landmark study.... This is a formidable narrative history, written with great verve and empathy. Through its meticulous scholarship and its deft weaving together of the social, economic, diplomatic and military history of this neglected front, The Fall of the Ottomans provides an engrossing picture of a deadly conflict that proved catastrophic for the peoples of the region.”
Prospect Magazine (UK)
This is narrative history at its very best: disciplined, well-paced, judicious and spiked with detail, character and incident.”
Shelf Awareness for Readers
Rogan handles the tricky subjects of jihad, secularism, Arab nationalism and Turkish paranoia about a possible Armenian fifth column with historical precision and a keen awareness of their implications for the modern world.”
Library Journal
[A] well-researched and well-written book.... A much-needed addition to World War I scholarship that is recommended for anyone interested in that conflict and the history of the Middle East or Turkey.”
Publishers Weekly
[A] sweeping and nuanced work.... Rogans multifaceted analysis touches on everything from the use of Islamist discourse in political movements to the treatment of minorities in the modern Middle East.”
Kirkus
[A] well-researched, evenhanded treatment of the Ottomans role in World War I.... An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region.”
Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
This is a gripping, masterful account of World War One in the Middle East from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire. It uses the full panoply of primary sources in Turkish, Arabic, and European languages to brilliantly illuminating effect. Combining magisterial scholarship with a keen sense of drama and lively narrative style, it tells a grim story but a fascinating one. There is a great deal of new material here which not only brings events alive but also leads to fresh assessments of all the participants in the Great War but especially Arabs and Turks. If you want to understand the underlying causes of conflict and violence in the Middle East in the last century, you will not find a better book.”
Rashid Khalidi, author of Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East
This book opens up a window on vital chapters in the shaping of the Middle East as well as the history of the Great War, bringing together vivid personal details with a broad historical panorama of human suffering and heroism, the incompetence and folly of the general staffs, and the scheming of the great powers.”
Margaret MacMillan, author of The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
Thoroughly researched and elegantly written by one of the leading experts on the region, The Fall of the Ottomans reminds us that the 1914-18 conflict was truly a world war with huge and continuing consequences. No one is better equipped than Eugene Rogan to handle the course and impact of the war in the Middle East and he does a superb job, telling a complex and multifaceted story with great clarity, understanding, and compassion. This timely and important work restores the Middle East to its rightful place in the history of the Great War.”
Mustafa Aksakal, Chair of Modern Turkish Studies and Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University
Eugene Rogan has given us an absorbing history of the wars principal military and political battles in the Middle East through the eyes of those who fought them. Weaving together accounts of the horrors of life in the trenches with those on the home front, he exposes the deadly dynamic emerging between the two, from the disastrous Ottoman attempt to invade Russia to the calamity of the Armenian deportations, from the British invasion to the Arab revolt and the Ottoman Empires final defeat and partition.”
Alexander Watson, author of Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I
A fantastic, readable, and much needed study of the most chronically neglected of all of the Great War's participants: the Ottoman Empire. Informative and enlightening.”
Ali Allawi, author of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
Eugene Rogan has written a meticulously researched, panoramic, and engrossing history of the final years of the Ottoman Empire. This book is essential reading for understanding the evolution of the modern Middle East and the root causes of nearly all the conflicts that now plague the area. An altogether splendid work of historical writing.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography
Thrilling, superb, and colorful, Eugene Rogans Fall of the Ottomans is brilliant storytelling. Filled with flamboyant characters, impeccable scholarship that illuminates the neglected Near Eastern theater of WWIshowing how the Ottomans managed to perform unexpectedly well against the Alliesand revelatory analysis that explains the modern Mideast, The Fall of the Ottomans is truly essential but also truly exciting reading.”
Roger Owen, Professor Emeritus of Middle East History, Harvard University
A vivid account of the fighting that led to the fall of one of the worlds great empires.”