Search results for ""author jeremy seal""

The most dramatic, revealing and little-known story in Turkey's history - which illuminates the nation'Through the spellbinding career of a single, ill-fated leader, Jeremy Seal illuminates a bitterly divided country' Colin Thubron'Read this book if you're interested in Turkey. Read it if you're interested in power, hubris and redemption. Read it' Christopher de Bellaigue, author of The Islamic EnlightenmentIn the spring of 2016 travel writer Jeremy Seal went to Turkey to investigate perhaps the most dramatic, revealing and little-known episode in the country's history - the 'original' coup of 1960, which deposed the traditionalist Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. The story of Menderes - to his adoring supporters the country's founding democrat; to his sworn enemies its most infamous traitor - goes to the heart of the feud that continues to rage between the Western and secular ambitions of a minority elite and the religious and conservative instincts of the small-town majority. A Coup in Turkey is a thrilling account of the events leading up to the coup and the trials and executions that followed, a story of political subterfuge and score-settling, courtroom drama, state execution, authoritarian intolerance and ideological division. Seal travels through President Erdogan's Turkey, tracking down eye-witness accounts from survivors of the Menderes era in Istanbul, the historic metropolis, and the new capital at Ankara. As he expertly guides us through this extraordinary story, so the compelling parallels between past and present become strikingly clear, and he illuminates this troubled nation with a deep sympathy and love for the people and places he writes about. By focussing on one key event - one which many Turks regard with shame - this evocative, gripping portrait of Turkey recentres our understanding of the past and makes sense of one of Europe's most bewildering yet intriguing neighbours.'A wonderful writer' Robert Macfarlane

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The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal is duty-bound to accept while travelling the length of it in a one-man canoe. At every twist and turn of his journey, from the Meander's source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea, Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural, historical and personal asides.It is a journey that takes him from Turkey's steppe interior - the stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes, Alexander the Great and the Crusader Kings - to the great port city of Miletus, home of the earliest Western philosophers. Along the way Seal unpicks the history of this remarkable region, but he also encounters a rich assortment of contemporary characters who reveal a rural Turkey on the cusp of change. Above all, this is the story of a river that first brought the cultures of East and West into contact - and conflict - with one another, its banks littered with the spoil of empires, the marks of war, and the detritus of recent industrialisation.At once epic, intimate and insightful, Meander is a brilliant evocation of a land between two worlds.

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