From Life Itself
Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan
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- Vorbestellbar
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- Erwartet am 28. Apr. 2026
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
One neighborhood in Istanbul: a window on a city, country, region, and world in a state of upheaval.
Karagumruk, an Istanbul neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for petty thieves, cheap apartment blocks, and a massive influx of Syrian refugees. It's here that Suzy Hansen went looking for the truth behind the headlines of the Turkish president Erdoğan's authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an accelerating geopolitical crisis. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of what would soon arise in other countries, the resurgence of authoritarianism? Or do the lives of this neighborhood, and the transformations of Erdoğan's Turkey, reveal a more complex story?
During a decade spent reporting from Karagumruk, Hansen discovered the neighborhood's secrets and got to know its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist for Erdoğan's Islamic nationalist AK party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail. Through these local perspectives, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagümrük to the forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world, capturing the sweep of the last ten years in microcosm.
From the author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, From Life Itself is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers lessons for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hansen (Notes on a Foreign Country) explores how ordinary people cope with "mind-blowing... systemic transformation" stemming from global trends in this illuminating close-up view of one Istanbul neighborhood. In recent years, the narrow streets of the old, poor district of Karagumruk have become home to a swelling number of Syrian refugees. Their arrival has brought cultural and linguistic transformation to an area whose constancy the native Turks have taken for granted since the end of the Ottoman Empire. While profiling colorful local characters who serve as a window into what dramatic global change does to individual lives and perspectives, Hansen cleverly considers whether countries like Turkey, located in an unraveling Middle East, have already borne witness to a "dissolution of nations and borders and people and seemingly civilization itself" that the West is now grappling with decades later. Hansen weaves into this thesis an explanation of the appeal of President Recep Erdogan, a man "formed by an ideology that grew out of the humiliating loss of a great Islamic Empire," who "alchemized his humiliation into proud liberal stewardship of the old nation until he began his angry fabrication of a new one." The result is a captivating consideration of Turkey as a truly "post-Western" nation charting its own course in a globalized world.
