This history gives voice to Arab and Turkish witnesses to World War I and the eradication of an empire.
There’s never been much love lost for eastern fronts. East, after all, is a direction in which the notional West has trouble thinking. Today the thought of Middle Eastern war is a shabby jack-in-the-box: a rote, unpleasant surprise at regular intervals. It’s the conflict zone that, to steal from Eugene O’Neill, has in the Western imagination “no present or future — only the past happening over and over again.” And so arriving in that context, Eugene Rogan’s new The Fall of the Ottomans is both the history of a World War and the biography of a cliché.
Read Full Article »
