Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey, by Hugh Pope & Nicole Pope
For nearly 20 years, Hugh Pope has been a newspaper correspondant living in Turkey, most recently for The Wall Street Journal. Having studied Turkey and Turkish at Oxford, he was well prepared for the job.
This easy-to-read narrative history tells the story of the birth of the modern Turkish Republic out of the collapse of the moribund Ottoman Empire.
Kemal Atatürk achieved the incredible task of wrenching a medieval state and society out of the musty past and placing it firmly on the path to democracy, secularism and modernization.
He was so much the father of modern Turkey (as his adopted surname—”Father of the Turks”—implies) that after his death in 1938, his successors were somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed.
Despite some political vacillation, wrong turns and dead-ends, Atatürk‘s goal of creating a modern nation has largely been accomplished. Its further accomplishment is now driven by Turkey’s desire to fulfill Atatürk‘s legacy completely by becoming a member state of the European Union.
This is the story of Turkey in the 20th century. Hugh and Nicole Pope tell it well in Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey.
Hugh Pope is also the author of Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, a new history of the Turkic peoples of Europe and Asia.
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