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1908-1938: La Turquie se dévoile (Collection "Les Grands reportages photographiques de l'histoire")
French
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 3, 2024
History as Kings, Wars, and “Great Men”
Damn! This book has as much photographic evidence as possible of the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey from the 1300s to 1938, but they are all in poorly-rendered black and white. Only a few have come out decently even if it is a good collection. And then there’s the English text with a myriad misspellings and numerous grammatical mistakes as if it had been written in French and translated by someone who dropped out of English 202 in sophomore year. I was perplexed as to how somebody got away with this. If you are interested to view these photos, some of which are no doubt interesting and hard to see anywhere else, you can try to find this thin volume. But I’ll warn you, the text is of that old fashioned history school which prizes the Sultans, their battles and conquests or their losses. There is only a little else until we get to the early 20th century and a bit of the complex politics of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Turkey, thanks to the efforts of Ataturk. It’s a slight effort definitely not worth reading. In any case it is so sparse that it would only take you a couple of hours at most.
But being curious as to why the author’s names or initials did not appear before his last name and the question of why there is no date of publication, I took the trouble of looking up this dude on Google. There I was not pleased to find that he was a Nazi-supporter, a minister in the Vichy government condemned to death at the end of the war, but instead pardoned after 6 years in jail. He was considered a brilliant fellow, a top French intellectual, but wtf? They can have him. I’m out of here.
Damn! This book has as much photographic evidence as possible of the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey from the 1300s to 1938, but they are all in poorly-rendered black and white. Only a few have come out decently even if it is a good collection. And then there’s the English text with a myriad misspellings and numerous grammatical mistakes as if it had been written in French and translated by someone who dropped out of English 202 in sophomore year. I was perplexed as to how somebody got away with this. If you are interested to view these photos, some of which are no doubt interesting and hard to see anywhere else, you can try to find this thin volume. But I’ll warn you, the text is of that old fashioned history school which prizes the Sultans, their battles and conquests or their losses. There is only a little else until we get to the early 20th century and a bit of the complex politics of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Turkey, thanks to the efforts of Ataturk. It’s a slight effort definitely not worth reading. In any case it is so sparse that it would only take you a couple of hours at most.
But being curious as to why the author’s names or initials did not appear before his last name and the question of why there is no date of publication, I took the trouble of looking up this dude on Google. There I was not pleased to find that he was a Nazi-supporter, a minister in the Vichy government condemned to death at the end of the war, but instead pardoned after 6 years in jail. He was considered a brilliant fellow, a top French intellectual, but wtf? They can have him. I’m out of here.
Displaying 1 of 1 review