Black Sea

The Black Sea cities of Odessa, Sevastopol, Trabzon and of course Istanbul all conjure up the exotic for me, which drew me to this book in the first place. It comes across as a very well researched book, filled with excellent history, politics, culture and anthropology, as well as cataloguing the authors own travel in the area around the Black Sea.

But I suspect my review and probably more-so my reading of this book probably don't do it justice. For me, there was just too much to take in. I am not such a thorough reader to be able to cope with so much information in a constant stream, and having completed the book, the vast majority of information is instantly lost to me. Perhaps a more scholarly reader would take notes or formulate their own time-line to track the vast wealth of information contained here, but that isn't me, and is not why I read. As it was I had to read this in stints of a couple of chapters at a time, with another book in between. Other reviewers have commented on the complexity, so I don't feel too bad about being a bit lost at times - my knowledge of the area around the Black Sea is fairly minimal.

Other reviewers have picked up on biases (which I did not find or notice), or indicated that the jumping time-line is too complex, (the book seems to have a chapter arranged around a theme, and this enables Ascherson to jump about in the timeline, this didn't bother me as a way to arrange the book, but it didn't help me sort it all out in my head!).

4 stars, but perhaps more or less if I understood it more!