Title: A dismal book
Product review: This is an extraordinarily badly written -- and bad tempered -- book which is mainly about Turkey rather than 'the Middle East' more generally. Many of its chapters are insubstantial, bottom drawer stuff, with leaps from one rag-bag topic to another without any coherent intellectual argument to pin them together. The book is also astonishingly one-sided: 'what went wrong' -- a bizarre and patronising concept in itself -- is laid entirely at the door of Lewis's version of 'the Orient' and there is no rational critique of European and American imperial and colonial engagements with its various peoples. Fortunately there are many other books which provide much better critical discussions of the political cultures of the region. At the (welcome) end of this tired polemic I was left with only one question: How is it possible for a man to devote so much of his life studying a culture for which he has such visceral contempt?
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