Menu
Top of the pile
79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
77/100Critics
67/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Mark Mazower
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
November 16, 2021
Columbia University history professor Mazower narrates the history of Greeceâs 1821 war of independence against the Ottoman Empire and its inauguration of a new era of nation-states that ushered in the modern world.
What The Reviewers Say
... a rich, illuminating, and imposing history of that paradigm-shifting conflict. Like characters in a Homeric epic, the players in Greece’s war emerge, in Mazower’s telling, in an apparently orderly fashion. An expert storyteller, Mazower unravels a Gordian knot of local, regional, and international factionalisms.
Mark Mazower has turned the tables and shown, with consummate skill and attention to all the available Greek and international sources, that the Greek Revolution was indeed foundational for the 'making of modern Europe'.
... represents the perfect union of these two poles of his career — a largely internationalist history of what is often seen as a local even.
Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University in New York City, revels in complexity. One can sense his frenzied enthusiasm when he describes 'bewildering twists' and politics of 'mind-boggling' convolution. While some of the revolution’s conundrums are solved, Mazower throws a host of new ones into the mix. Clarity, it seems, is a contrivance. While this is an altogether impressive book, it left me breathless with confusion.
