Middle East - Travel Essays & Descriptions - General & Miscellaneous, Eastern Europe - Travel, Europe - General & Miscellaneous - Travel Essays & Descriptions, Turkey - Travel
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Overview
Turkish or European? European or Muslim? Muslim or Communist? Such were the identities that Scott Malcomson found people grappling with as he traveled through Eastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia. Learning the languages and immersing himself in the cultures, Malcomson focused on the tensions between local and universal identity in these countries that are historically at the margins of empires and currently on the faultlines of civil war. In these borderlands, the conflict between nation and empire plays itself out on the world stage only when it reaches crisis proportion. But the issues swirling around these outposts have remained unresolved since the land was first divided two thousand years ago by kings and despots. In Borderlands, young Romanian anti-Semites and Muslim fundamentalists speak alongside peasant farmers and privileged schoolgirls and offer their own perspectives on the age-old conflicts. Malcomson encounters Sufi mystics in Bukhara and rootless cosmopolitans at a Bulgarian disco. Whether at a Romanian coal mine or around the neighborhood in Tashkent, he resists easy judgments; instead, he listens and learns. Part historical essay, part reportage, part philosophical speculation, Borderlands is a stunningly innovative work that explores a world that can no longer claim fixed points of reference.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Malcomson, author of Tuturani and an editor at the Village Voice , reports on the borderland identities of people living in Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Uzbekistan in the early 1990s. Recently freed (in most cases) from communist dominion, these countries are experiencing an intense nationalism, but for what traditions? Their pasts are woven in a tapestry with heritages that include ancient marauders, Greeks, Romans, Asiatics; the civilizations embrace Muslim, Christian, fascist, racist, agrarian and communist traditions. Today the desire to join the European Community is tempered by a deep ambivalence toward the values and powers of the West. Malcomson, who traveled in these countries in 1991-1992, brilliantly combines personal encounters with an erudite, wide description of the countries' disparate pasts. Vivid and engaging as a current document, the book is also a rich historical and political review of four unique civilizations now determining their future directions. (Feb.)Library Journal
Malcomson's account of the Balkans, Turkey, and Uzbekistan is written with a journalist's eye for details. Setting the stage with a brief account of the Bosphorus--the narrow strait that connects the Mediterranean and Black seas and divides Europe and Asia--he paints a vivid picture of a region not completely a part of Europe or Asia. Starting in Romania and moving on to Bulgaria, Istanbul, and Uzbekistan, Malcomson covers a great deal of ground, intellectually, historically, and culturally. His book felicitously combines contemporary observations of daily life with cultural and historical events from the recent and faraway past. The result is an informative account of the region that is also very entertaining. While not scholarly, Borderlands is quite comprehensive in its coverage of the distinctive and fascinating cultures of the region.-- Joseph P. Parsons, Columbia Coll., ChicagoBook Details
Published
February 1, 1994
Publisher
Boston : Faber and Faber, c1994.
Pages
289
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780571198153