This remarkably insightful book taught me a great deal about Turkish politics -- more than any other book on the topic I have ever read, and more than I had gathered from many visits to Turkey over the years. It is also of more general interest, in that it looks like a complex political situation from what is in large part an anthropological view. The author is a social anthropologist, and a long-term student of Turkey -- in addition to her serious work, she has also written excellent historical mysteries set in Ottoman Istanbul. She approaches the emergence of the "mildly Islamist" (as the Western press tends to say) AK Party as a social phenomenon reflecting a reformulation of what it means to be Turkish -- a reformulation that is in sharp conflict with the secular Kemalist approach that characterized the recent past. She also makes it clear that is not a simple conflict, or a simple state of affairs. Many Turks have both Ismalist and Kemalist views, and those views are affected by where they live, their ethnic background, class and age, and many other factors. If this sounds like social sciences babble, that's my fault, not the author's -- the book sheds remarkable light on a remarkably complex situation.

Many readers, particularly those with strong personal links to Turkey and/or Turkey's past, will disagree with some of Ms. White's opinions. To me, however, she seems fair and balanced. This book was recommended to me by a Turkish friend, a secularist and strongly Kemalist person. She thinks that the book understates the importance of what Kemalism accomplished, but also thinks that the book is basically fair and illuminating.

Beyond Turkey, I found this book fascinating in the anthropological lens through which it views politics. One point she makes is that key concepts -- "Turkishness", "secularism", and so on -- mean very different things to different people in Turkey. This made me think of the US. Doesn't "gun control" mean something very different to a Northeastern city dweller than it does to a Western rancher? And what about "choice", and "fair voting practices", and so on? Identity is important to U.S. politics in a way that goes way beyond ethnicity. ( )