... 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.

Mazower, a professor at Columbia University, sets himself the task not just of retelling the familiar story of the Greek fight for independence but of placing the event in the broader context of modern European history. His book unfolds as an engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis.

... [a] superb new history of the rebellion and its broader implications.

Mark Mazower’s...elegant and rigorous account...holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.

... a detailed examination of the Greek quest for independence from the Ottoman Empire during the first portion of the 19th century.

His lucid, elegantly written, and often gripping account of the chaos contains hopeful developments, including the fitful growth of a constitutional Greek government and the rise of a geopolitics of national self-determination and international humanitarian intervention that led to the break-up of European empires into independent nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Broad in scope and colorful in detail, this is a masterful portrait of a historic watershed..

... Mazower...ably ties together the many disparate threads of this complex history.