I’ve enjoyed Hugh Pope‘s reporting in The Wall Street Journal for years, and I thoroughly enjoyed—and learned a lot from—his book Turkey Unveiled.
His new book, SONS OF THE CONQUERORS: The Rise of the Turkic World, looks far beyond the modern Turkish Republic and its Ottoman past.
Turkish history and culture is a lot deeper than the empire and the republic, and this depth is familiar to, and treasured by, every modern Turk. It is integral to their view of the world. As the Turkic peoples—140 million of them—become more important in world politics, commerce and culture, it’s important to know where they’re coming from.
Turks proudly claim to have been the masters of a dozen important states and empires in Europe and Asia, including the Mogul empire in India, the Safavidsof Iran, and the Mamelukes of Egypt. Today they are the majority in the Turkish Republic, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, with significant minorities of Turkic peoples in many other countries, including Iran, Iraq and China.
Anyone interested in Turks and Turkey will want to read Sons of the Conquerors. In fact, we should all read just about anything Hugh Pope writes on Turkey. I do.
Published in New York by Overlook Press and in London by Duckworth. Price: $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 1-58567-641-1.1 map and 34 b&w photos, 6×9 trim size, 432 pages. Distributed by Viking/Penguin.
| Sons of the ConquerorsWebsite |  Good reading for your trip to Turkey… |
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