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Norman Stone's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Norman Stone recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Norman Stone's favorite book recommendations of all time.

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a XXXXXXXXXXXX X X X X X X if if X if if r r I y x xxx xxx x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x NEW YORK THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 1950 if 3f PORTRAIT OF A TURKISH FAMILY . To Margarete, my wife, with love 10. Contents 1 Introducing the Family 1 2 An Autocrat at the Hamam 1 1 3 A Purely Masculine Subject 26 4 Sariyer 37 5 The New House and Other Things 52 6 The Changing Scene 64 7 Week-End Leave and the New Bride 78 8 Muazzez Makes Her Debut 93 9 A Long Farewell 101 10 Trying to Build Again 113 11 The End of Sariyer 127 12 Disillusionment of an... more
Recommended by Norman Stone, and 1 others.

Norman StoneIt’s by a man called Irfan Orga and it’s called Portrait of a Turkish Family. It was a bestseller in the 1940s and is still on sale. Orga was from a good Ottoman family. They lost everything in the [First World] War and he ended up in an orphanage. He went into the army and became a Turkish fighter pilot. He fell in love with an Irish girl, but if you worked in the Turkish state you couldn’t... (Source)

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Turkey

A Short History

Recommended by Norman Stone, and 1 others.

Norman StoneWould modesty forbid me from talking about my own? (Source)

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Chosen by The Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945. Investigator Yashim travels to Venice in the the Edgar Award winning author Jason Goodwin's captivating series
Jason Goodwin's first Yashim mystery, The Janissary Tree, brought home the Edgar® Award for Best Novel. His follow-up, The Snake Stone, more than lived up to expectations and was hailed by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review as a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth.†Now, in The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin takes us back...
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Recommended by Norman Stone, and 1 others.

Norman StoneLet’s give Jason Goodwin’s series of mysteries a puff. His central detective character is Yashim, an Ottoman eunuch in 19th century Istanbul, a very clever man who solves crimes – which are ingeniously done. Goodwin can tell a good story, and it’s remarkable what he knows about the Ottoman empire. He knows it better than I do, in the sense that he can tell you about cooking and that kind of... (Source)

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4
Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.

Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the...
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Recommended by Norman Stone, and 1 others.

Norman StonePhilip Mansel’s book Levant is a comparison of Beirut, Alexandria and Smyrna in the modern age. He talks about how the Christians and non-Christians got on. Obviously he ends with the disaster of the Christians being squeezed out, and he feels that things went downhill after that. It’s an awfully good book. (Source)

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The Greek worlds of classical antiquity and Byzantine empire left a legacy of Hellenic culture throughout Asia Minor. During the nineteenth century the Greek nation fostered the idea of a resuscitated empire embracing Constantinople and Ionia, which would reclaim from the Turks what had been lost when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman invaders in 1453. The nineteenth century also saw the establishment and gradual expansion of the independent Greek kingdom, which climaxed with the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the incorporation of western Macedonia, Epirus and Crete. The architect of the...
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Recommended by Philip Mansel, Norman Stone, and 2 others.

Philip ManselSmyrna, or Izmir as it’s now called, is a large port city on the western coast of Anatolia. It was a natural export outlet for figs, carpets and all the other products of Anatolia and beyond. It was a huge commercial city from about 1650, full of Greek, Turkish and foreign merchants. Although there were terrible riots and massacres in 1770 and in 1821, on the whole the different communities got... (Source)

Norman StoneIt’s quite an old book – it has been reissued but it originally came out about 1973. It’s about the attempts of the Greeks to take over Anatolia in 1919. This was his doctorate, and it’s terribly well written. He’s been through all the British and the Greek documents, which can’t have been easy. (Source)

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