Atatürk [B1242]

2004 PB in excellent condition. - This biography of Ataturk, founding father of the Turkish Republic, aims to strip away the myth to show the complexities of the man beneath. Born plain Mustafa in Ottoman Salonica in 1881, he trained as an army officer but was virtually unknown until 1919, when he took the lead in thwarting the victorious Allies' plan to partition the Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire. He divided the Allies, defeated the last Sultan and secured the territory of the Turkish national state, becoming the first president of the new republic in 1923. He imposed coherence, order and modernity and in the process, created his own legend and his own cult.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Atatürk executed a feat of nation-building that is, I believe, without peer in the 20th century. Almost all of this was accomplished during a single decade, the 1920s. His reforms ran from the ridiculous (barring the fez) to the sublime (eliminating the sultanate and caliphate). It's impossible to imagine modern Türkiye without the impact of Atatürk. Of course, when you swing the pendulum one direction, it has a tendency to swing back. The Islamization of Türkiye today could be seen as a repudiation of Kemalism. But Türkiye is a modern Islamic state which looks nothing like Ottoman Türkiye. This story has a lot of characters, and I found it difficult to keep them straight. It's possible that Mango could have written a much shorter book with fewer details of the make-up of all of the governments. But my time reading this was well-spent."; "The character of Atatürk has been someone both larger than life who yet one knows very little-a name that comes up without knowing much about him. A large part of this stems from a complete absence of knowledge which is probably relatively common outside of Turkey, of the man, his times, and his desires, not to mention the understanding of the context of these. Mr. Mango's work jumps far in bridging this gap. Overall, I really enjoyed every page of this tome!"; "Excellent biography of the founder of Turkey. Stubborn and at times self righteous, he was always supremely confident in his views. He undoubtedly changed the course of history for his people and the region as a whole."